Those first boats were filled with cannon fodder who were aware they were cannon fodder. And some were praying with the chaplains, who were standing up with crosses in their hands, and some were staring starkly, and some were so frightened their faces were in rictus states, and some were so sorrowful, so grief-stricken, that you couldn’t keep looking. Facing their deaths, their deaths were visible on their faces.

That’s what I was remembering while waiting for the teakettle. Those boys—and many of the boys were men—exist now only in documentary form and maybe in the minds, sometimes, of the people who saw the footage. It seems almost too private, like viewing autopsy photos, to have seen them in their last moments, reckoning with their own souls, fighting their own natural impulses to resist, to be like Henry in The Red Badge of Courage, to flee instead of fight. Henry, a young boy sent to the front lines of the Civil War, going from the farm fields to musket balls and hand-to-hand combat without ever having shaved, carrying a ration of jam his mother packed for him.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking while I made my tea, and now I’m back in my seat, computer on lap, listening to the flap of the shiny strips I’ve taped to my windows to keep the birds from flying kamikaze-style into the glass.

And, see, there’s a whole other essay in that—the planes spiraling down from the sky, aimed at a warship, missing it by the equivalent of inches, the pilots not bothering to ditch, because why. It’s an ocean. Their souls being yanked up and out of their bodies the way a parachute yanks its cargo upward when it opens.

There was nothing happening in Alaska when my dad arrived. He played basketball and cards and worked as a secretary for a higher-up, teaching himself how to type so that he could have time free to roam, since there wasn’t much to type about. And that’s where his real war stories begin.