[gmku]

I have a couple of suggestions for what happens to Don. If I were writing the series, I'd craft Don's fate thus:

1, He's dumped off the bus somewhere in California. Dazed and tired from a couple of days without food, he wanders into an Army recruiting station, gets mistaken for the outgoing recruiting officer's replacement, and quickly finds himself back in uniform with a promotion, to captain, and in charge of a processing station for young men being shipped to Vietnam.

2. Or, and I think this might be the better idea... Don ends up somewhere on the West Coast, as far as you can go, where the only thing left is ocean. The ocean has been linked to death, for Don, in previous shows. He sees, or hears about, boys being flown from the town he's in (Seattle? Portland?) to Vietnam; their first stop is paradise, Michem's Hawaii, and their next, of course, is the war, Dante's Inferno. Both books were referenced in past shows. He next sees some kids protesting General Electric's part in manufacturing for the war; GE was a client at one time. Out of guilt or confusion, he tries to enlist, but he learns that he's past the age limit, too old. With no place to go, noone to turn to, he ends up in a mission, gets fed, cleaned up, given a bed. He asks how long he can stay. He gets told, "Depends. Can you help? Are you a clean-up man?" Don says he's only ever created a lot of messes. He's told, "Well, maybe here's your chance to learn how to clean them up." He gets handed a broom and told he'll get told what to do. "Told what to do?" "You say that like it's something new you haven't heard before." Something like that.

Then, Don is sleeping in his mission bed and wakes up to the smell of smoke. Somebody fell asleep in another bed with a lit cigarette. The mission burns down, and the firemen tell the police there were no survivors. But we catch a glimpse of a figure walking away from the scene. It could be Don. But we don't know for sure. We watch him as he walks on down the street, becoming smaller and smaller, just a dot on the horizon, and then gone.