One boy, one girl, a string between them. How frail it felt to attempt one small gesture encapsulating a commotion of feelings: faith and hope, and perhaps some small amount of love, made featherlight. He felt an unfamiliar blossoming in his throat. He whispered to her, “Anyone who has faith in me is a sucker.” He tossed the puppets at her. They landed on her shoulder.

Which made the laughter she had been holding in finally burst out. Lee kept turning his head and twisting around in the bed, attempting to look sincere enough that she might stop laughing.

An hour later, he was in uniform and on the street, foot-slogging to the train station.

And the puppets? They were there, around his neck, and occasionally he fingered them, looking as puzzled as if he’d found seashells on a mountaintop.

The American Expeditionary Force shipped him to Le Havre, then Amanty, then Ourches, France, where he served in the gunnery of the 135th Aero Squadron. No matter how get-along he acted, the men were frequently irritable in response, and not because c’est la guerre.

The 135th was an observer squadron, a designation that made its members insecure. They were known as the Statue of Liberty Squadron, which irked them, in that it was accurate: a statue stood still and watched life pass it by. Unlike the famous 94th Hat in the Ring Squadron, which was designated for pursuit—and dogfights, and the making of aces, the 135th did not tend to kill Germans. The 135th was to take photographs, count troops, direct artillery—in short, its work was painfully short of glory.

Lee overheard officers complaining about the very brass on their lapels: a pursuit-squadron officer wore a badge with two wings; an observer squadron’s badge had one wing. As if the pilots would just fly in circles. Maddening!

Though there were manuals to teach them French, and classes in assembling every knob and sprocket of the Croisset bombsight, and training missions in SPADS culminating in whip stalls and sideslips, and enough engine failures to make every mission dangerous, there was something missing. There was no formal instruction in how to look like a hero.

They tended to lean on measures of ferocity—their mascots. The late Baron von Richthofen had had a huge dog, Moritz, and so the 135th found themselves a dog. Her name was Banjo, and she was by nature timid rather than fierce. She did not like beer, and when presented with an effigy of the Kaiser, she tried to run away instead of attacking it. This barely mattered—they poked her with sticks a few times, and she snarled, and that was enough.

Mostly, Banjo hid in a packing crate outside the mess tent. When a leather-coated ace from the 27th or the 94th or the 213th—pursuit squadrons—visited, the officers showed him Banjo, and his habits were meanwhile studied as if he were a little-known species of gazelle.