The first Marines had landed on the Canal three months earlier, but the battle for the island was far from over that early November. He was still keeping track of the days, then, making little notes when he could in an ersatz diary. It was November 23, his nineteenth birthday, when his 8th Marines set off in a column down a too-narrow path toward their objective, Hill 83. The cloying, stinking mass of jungle seemed as though it would devour them man by man. They had been warned of lurking scorpions, centipedes, tree leeches, massive wasps and spiders. JJ flinched with every scream of a cockatoo, and shivered when a lizard slipped across the path in front of him. Mosquitoes whirred about his head. He could taste the salt of his own sweat. And then the jungle exploded into sound and fire and a hail of bullets. There was nowhere to go. The Marines dropped, returned fire.

His first time. His first time, too, seeing men die. Friends.

It must have been a relief of sorts, JJ thought, to escape so effortlessly the incessant wondering about when your end would come.

But he wouldn’t talk about that, or the rest of it. Because the middle of it all was just like Buck Young said, a goddamn circus fun house.

The days rolled together: sweat, filth, stink, lice, horror, rain, sun, steam. You were a killer, for brief moments omnipotent. Afterward, you kicked the enemy to be sure he was dead and dug in his shirt pocket for the picture of himself each warrior carried, which became a souvenir for your own pocket. Moments later, you saw friends die. You were helpless to save them, and you wore your anguish on your skin. You didn’t know the way out, except to keep fighting. You trusted you would die soon enough, though you would do your damndest not to.

But each man, you knew, would find his end, and then his wandering would seem so foolish. Salvation, of a kind, waited around every next corner.

For JJ, the end came on Iwo. D-Day morning, February 19, 1945.

The previous summer, he’d taken shrapnel in his back, landing on the beach they called Green 1 at Saipan, and he’d been evacuated out on a hospital ship, ending up back in Hawaii. When the Navy declared him fit again, he was reassigned to the 5th Division, 27th Marines, which was how he ended up that February morning in an LVT chugging in toward another fucking island with the sea spray wetting his face, his rifle clutched in his hand, his pack heavy on his back. A sergeant, by that time, knowing it was what he was made for. But a man never got used to it, either, and especially not approaching that black, smoking piece of real estate that looked like hell to begin with.