I don’t remember diving for cover, Kennet wrote. It’s one of many moments lost to me. All at once my face was in the snow and when I picked it up, blood and gore were left behind. I thought I was hit, still I scrabbled like mad with my hands, looking for the closest foxhole the 9th had left. I couldn’t find one. I was trying to dig myself straight into the hillside like a mole. I made myself flatter than a piece of paper, kept my head down and listened to the Germans’ machine gun fire. Their guns are faster than ours. You can immediately distinguish them by the speed.

The firing died down. I picked up my head and looked straight into what was left of Malinda’s face. One eye, one cheek and the bridge of his nose. The rest was a shattered, bloody mess. Four feet away lay his body, whole and pristine and perfect.

Fucking Krauts literally shot his head off.

I yanked my gaze to my other side, trying to forget forever what I’d just seen, and PFC Silver stared back at me. His hands clutched a horrible belly wound, grey and pink loops falling between his fingers.

“Oh Christ, Silver,” I said, knowing he was a goner.

“Malmedy, Fish,” he whispered. “Okay? My brother at Malmedy. No prisoners.”

And he died.

Kennet was penned in by death and suffering. Behind him, two men were moaning. Ahead of him, Baby was yelling he’d been hit. To his left, the gut-shot Silver. To his right, Malinda’s head.

Oh my God his teeth that’s a tooth right there on the snow like the Hun whose head exploded and his tooth went into my father’s leg…

Kennet pushed his face into the snow and counted five freezing seconds.

Okay. You’re done. That’s all you get. Think about it later. Feel it later.

He looked up as a soldier and made a brutal triage of his three wounded comrades. Baby was closest to the machine gunner in the haystack, so Kennet crawled through the snow to him.

Baby had taken a shot in the arm but the wound looked clean. The rapid German fire kept rattling, but it became background noise in Kennet’s ears as he fell into an odd trance of efficiency, remembering all his training, knowing what to do. Every soldier carried a first aid kit with a Carlisle dressing. Kennet took Baby’s and bandaged the wound. He found the kit’s sulfa tablets but the water in his canteen was frozen. He told Baby to swallow them with a handful of snow.

“Start crawling. Head toward the rear. Stay as low as you can.”

“Take my clips,” Baby said. “On my belt. Take them. There’s a foxhole about twenty yards down the hill.”

Kennet took the ammunition clips from Baby’s belt. A beat when they looked hard at each other.