I give a last glance at the balcony, just as the wall of the building collapses into the street, sending sparks and cinders flying heavenward. Thankfully, I do not see the woman’s body. It has been consumed in the flames, and what is left is indistinguishable in the rubble.

“Move out, Tanner,” Evans repeats, and he points his rifle in the direction I am to go.

I look down the street ahead and see a storm of tracers shredding the air at the intersection of the next corner. Explosions reverberate and echo in the streets, while brilliant flashes reflect off the smoke-filled sky above.

I bring my rifle up to the ready and pull my head down into my shoulders, like a man without a hat, steeling himself to run out into a heavy rain. I take a first hesitant step—and then find myself awake in my bunk, bathed in a cold sweat.

But I remember more now that I am awake. Afterward, none of us in the squad ever spoke of that moment—that act. Never. Young as we were, we instinctively knew that it was taboo, and thus, it was the great untouchable. It was a subject so far beyond the emotional pale as to put it in the realm of dark unknowingness.

But there were times, usually in moments of unexpected repose, when nothing else was going on, that I would steal a surreptitious glance at Evans and find him sitting off by himself. Silent, and still as a statue, his eyes lifted slightly above a private horizon, staring into the infinite distance of the great beyond—el más allá, as they say in Panama.

And in those moments I could see expressed quite plainly on his face—on his whole demeanor—the soul-corroding poison he carried within, and would carry with him forever, for that one, that bone-chilling act of incomprehensible courage.

I marveled that a man could wield such awful courage. Marveled at, but also feared it, as one cannot help but fear the unknown. And now, more than twenty years later, I find that I marvel at it still and am still afraid.