When you hear the telltale noise, you gird for horror. The things modern machinery can do to a human body, it’s enough to make you retch your guts out, enough to make you die of pity. I don’t know how the army surgeons survived it. I don’t understand how you could lock up the pity and the horror into a steel vault deep inside the bank of your soul, how you could set about repairing a mutilated limb or a split-open skull or some devastated viscera in the same way you might repair a flat tire, say.

In England, before the Allied invasion, I was living in staff huts right near an air base, and just about every other day some poor chap would ram his ship into the earth nearby. The others in the press pool would dutifully trudge out to take notes and pictures, to point and stare and shake their heads at the gore, but I never would. I never went to see a crackup if I could help it, although there were plenty of times I couldn’t help it, and I faced the wreckage as bravely as I could. Also, I had a rule not to sleep with any pilots. You might get attached, after all, and then they would inevitably get killed, and you were left to imagine those last seconds over and over, the certain expectation of death, your helplessness in the face of it, your beloved body strapped into a hunk of metal that plummeted toward the earth, nothing you could do but wait for annihilation. I can’t think of a thing in the world more terrifying than that.

And now this terror has followed me here, to a peaceful corner of a remote island in the middle of the Pacific. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? Still I follow Olle and the two pilots out of the cafeteria and into the soft Hawaiian morning. The three of them bolt toward the smoking pile of metal and drag out the body like any old piece of meat. Olle seems to know what he’s doing. He arranges limbs and listens for breath and barks some order at one of the pilots. In the distance, someone’s dragging out a water tank on some kind of caisson.

And I say to myself, God forgive me.

I’m going to tell you a story now, a story I’ve never told anybody. It does me little credit, but I was young and foolish, as the saying goes, and haven’t we all got some old folly that tortures us?