He didn’t know how long they’d been there when the order came to advance. Just then, four stretcher bearers scuttled up and lifted him onto a stretcher. One of them jabbed him in the thigh with a shot of morphine. JJ yelled at them to get his men first, but they ignored him. Bertinelli gave him a pat on the shoulder, then advanced with the others. JJ called out “Give ’em hell!” His voice cracked.

Jouncing along on the litter, he closed his eyes for a minute. His leg was starting to hurt like hell. The stretcher bearers, running upright because of their burden, battled the give of the black sand with every stride, dodging the bullets that zinged through the air. One grazed a button on JJ’s shirt. The stretcher bearers got him to the aid station on the beach, where they dropped him, and then ran back toward the fray. “Well,” said the blond Marine on the sand next to him, whose legs were missing below his knees, “looks like the end of the war for us.” And he grinned, offering JJ a cigarette, as a shell burst just fifty yards behind them. “Right,” JJ said, and took the cigarette, hoping it would kill the sulfurous stink that coated the insides of his nostrils. He smoked, his hands filthy, trembling.

He had always imagined death, a quick shutting away of himself, his mother hanging a gold star banner in the front window of the house where he had grown up, the neighbors bringing casseroles, the girls from his high school all wishing to themselves that they’d had the foresight to sleep with him before he left for the war. Becoming a cripple seemed to him both ineffectual and entirely unsatisfying. That this would be the answer to all he had experienced—that his life would continue, and in such a manner—was the strangest idea to grasp.

These many months later, there were still days when his mind would wrestle against the utter inadequacy of it.

“Some fucking hero,” he muttered, around his cigarette, the lights of the train car blurring in his vision.

“What’s that, Marine?” said the old man sitting next to him.

JJ looked over at the man, who was craggy-faced with a large red nose, cow-brown eyes, and inky hair poking out from under a crumpled fedora. JJ stubbed out his cigarette. “Nothing,” he said.

It was quiet a moment, and then the old man spoke up. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d make something of that brunette over there that’s giving you the eye.” He pointed his chin down the aisle.