You can blame them for sending you in. But the little thrill that traveled up your spine when you saw, as you shot up into the tree, the sniper’s head explode into the blue sky? The ecstasy in your voice when you told the guy next to you, “Got him!” On Iwo, the calm satisfaction you felt, seeing the three men you shot fall, knowing there were probably more you’d got, too, without seeing. It was like the deer hunting you’d done as a boy, only better, and you felt the calm satisfaction of a job well done.

How can you live with a monster like that? When the monster is you?

Because you have to admit, the whole thing was a hell of a thrill. Even if you were too scared to see straight half the time when you were going in. Even if you saw men who’d been buddies in life turn, in death, to creatures unspeakably grotesque, stinking things that made you have to tie a rag over your nose and mouth and turn your eyes away before you gagged. A hell of a thrill.

There are no words to describe this to your family, your friends. What you were, the things you did. There is an utter disconnect between that life and this. In fact, you have a clear memory of waking up in the hospital in Hawaii one day, as if awakening from a long nightmare. You were startled to be in a clean bed between two clean sheets. You couldn’t believe you were actually clean, alive, nearly whole. You’d slept and awakened many times in the days since Iwo, but this was the first time you truly realized where you were. That it was, for you, all over.

But, if it was a nightmare you’d awakened from that morning, the nightmare hasn’t left you. And the pain in that goddamn leg, you can’t get around that reminder. You can’t deny that you don’t have the leg anymore, that you’ve exchanged the actual leg for the mere sensation of it, for the itches you can’t scratch, the shooting pains, the feeling like the leg is twisted at odd angles underneath you. It feels so real, that absent leg, it makes you think you’re crazy. It makes you wonder what else is imagined that you think is real, what is real that you think you’ve imagined. Your memories and your dreams are at times indistinguishable from one another.