Amarjeet thought he might, eventually, perhaps when he had rested enough, go back to India and bring back a bride. Ram had failed in bringing Padma, but there was a difference. Ram was not a citizen, and Amarjeet was. He would do this just as soon as he recovered a bit from the war, when he stopped hearing that pounding in his ears, when he could sleep again. He noticed sometimes that Karak and Rosa would argue; he could hear their voices across the expanse between the houses. He met Adela; he noticed Ram and she would share an occasional glance when they thought others weren’t looking. It did not bother him.

What interested him was France and the war. He realized that people at home knew more about it than he had known over there: strategy and battle plans, General Pershing’s refusal to split American forces under British or French command. How that meant more Americans might die than the alternative. How the U.S. Army planned full frontal assault: simply throwing more young bodies at the battle line until Germany ran out of young men to counter them. Was this patriotism? Had it made the world safe for democracy?

Between harvesting and planting he went to the library in El Centro to learn more. The general had issued the order for expedited citizenship just before the first all-American offensive at Saint-Mihiel. So that all the immigrant soldiers would not desert. When Amarjeet read this, his throat went dry. He thought the ploys of strategy were used only against the enemy.

He read about the German in Brawley who had been tarred and feathered for refusing to buy Liberty bonds. He read about the German who had been lynched in Illinois. This too made him sick. He had not hated the Germans during the war. Harry had not hated them either. The Germans, the French, the British, the Americans—they had been a bunch of farm boys, wishing for their mothers, dreaming of their sweethearts, shooting at each other across a no-man’s-land. The morning the armistice was announced, some men on the line had run forward to embrace the German soldiers they had shot at just hours earlier. The farm boys had not wanted the war. They had never wanted the war. If he—Amarjeet Singh of Tarkpur village, Ludhiana district, son of Gurinder Singh—had shot and killed people, he did not want to think about that now.

To him, the war had been about carrying supplies to the front line on his cart and coming back to the rear with that same cart loaded down with bodies. There had been so many, many, bodies. There had been no difference between them, save the tint of skin or hair: Irish and Chinese, Sicilian and Jew, Mexican and Arab and Japanese. If he had served alongside Negroes, he knew there would have been no difference there either.