After Pearl Harbor, the work at Pine Camp, the military’s training base, quadrupled and Kennet was kept on for the duration of the massive expansion. The Army purchased another 75,000 acres of land and took possession like a horde of Mongols, wiping five villages off the map and displacing over five hundred local families. The beefed-up workforce began constructing an entire city: hospitals, warehouses, barracks, mess halls, buildings for Army business and buildings for Army recreation. At the same time, one of the worst winters in recorded history was breathing down the neck of the North Country. Men fought frozen machinery, machinery fought the frozen ground, and nature fought the men with hypothermia, chilblains and frostbite. The numbing cold and constant tingling pain in fingers and toes could drive a man to drink.

As the hard winter turned to soft summer, the work at Pine Camp ended and Kennet was shipped out to Camp Polk, Louisiana, for basic training. Finally his poor, suffering extremities knew true relief, but even now, three years later, they bitched and moaned when winter came around again.

Nineteen forty-two had been a cold, dark, depressing time in Kennet’s life, when he defined himself by the loss of Astrid. Emotionally speaking, the Army was the best thing that could have happened to him. The first thing the military did was strip your possessions and your personality away—happiness, heartbreak, handsomeness, even hair. As soon as the barber started running clippers over the top of Kennet’s head, he felt a slight change within. He watched, mesmerized, as hunks of his blond hair started falling around his shoulders and tumbling to the floor, taking with them the sweet memory of cafune—Astrid’s fingers running along his crown and temples. The fuzzy pile was swept up and unceremoniously pushed onto the bigger pile of shorn locks in the corner.

Well, that’s that, Kennet thought. He fell into line, one of hundreds of men who now looked just like him. Within a single hellish week, he grasped that Uncle Sam had no interest in a fellow’s hurt feelings, and boot camp simply didn’t give a guy the time or energy to pine. His ass would be whipped into shape, come hell or Hildur. He could do it the hard way and bring his pissy attitude along, or he could chuck it over the side and embrace being worked into physical and mental oblivion. Even be grateful for it.

Training with the 21st Army Infantry Battalion took Kennet to four different bases in two years: from Camp Polk to Camp Barkeley in Texas. (“Not for me either,” he wrote home to Marta, who was finally sticking his green pins in her world map.) Then Camp Ibis in Needles, California, and finally Camp Cooke in Lompoc.