When Wolfe saw his first battle at Dettingen at the age of sixteen he looked in the mud and found headless men, bodiless arms flung from horses, the ancient death-grimace on face after face. He grabbed the dead faces and looked in their eyes—were any of them his brother? He found his brother Ned-not-Ned again and again…

“At our shithole Ghundy Ghar,” I tell Harold, “that hill rising out of the poppies like a filthy boil, I hunted for Elwyn exactly as Wolfe once looked for his brother Ned. But afterwards, Wolfe repaired to his tent, alone, for two whole days. I didn’t have that luxury, not one day, not even an hour or a minute—not a second, even now—after watching Elwyn crawl in the dust trying to find his arm….”

“Elwyn, whom you loved?”

“With his arm blown off he looked like the scorpions we hunted at night. Our gunner, Mavis, used to slice their legs off and sprinkle them on his meal pack. He had the maimed victims race each other, the side with legs thumping and dragging the amputated side. We called it the Mangled Assassin Olympics. Elwyn looked like one of them, dragging himself toward us: one side raising itself unnaturally high with each lurch, and the armless side, the left, and he was left-handed—dragging with a horrible judder. I was freaking out because he and I had made a deal: one sees the other permanently maimed and we finish him off.”

“But then you couldn’t.”

“You quickly redo the math when it happens: an arm missing might not be all that bad. He can do things with the other one. Choose knife or fork. Ruffle the dog. Hold me in his remaining arm while we sleep. Elwyn and I had three arms between us and yes, I loved him.”

“Why could he not run?”

“The Afghans were a few hundred yards away—Elwyn should’ve had no problem running to us—but his every move was pinned to the mud and stones because he was searching, he was asking where the fuck did my arm go.

“I’m gonna fetch him, I told Mavis, who was busy unjamming his C7 in his boxers and a pair of flip-flops he’d made of duct tape and packing foam from a shipment of Tim Hortons vanilla dip with sprinkles. We had eighteen doughnuts each that day.

“The Afghans started flinging grenades and mortars and we had a new problem appearing at the east side of our position: I saw we were in for a Taliban swarm we’d failed to expect.