So when she said, “Are you all right?” he said, “Yup.”

He did not report on his day, or anything that happened in his life, and if something went wrong he kept it to himself. He might be reprimanded at the main gate for not checking at the guardhouse—for just walking in, and being yelled at by the sentry. He said nothing. He said little of school. He mentioned his friends’ names but did not elaborate. Sometimes, after he’d spent a whole afternoon at the pool, he’d say (because his mother insisted), “I was at the rec room.”

His secrets were small, but they mattered, because they were his secrets. He wanted to be a better swimmer, a better student, a faster runner. He knew he was unformed, still learning. He refused to offer progress reports. He was ashamed that he was so small and incompetent—not good at anything—but that was a secret too.

His habit of concealment strengthened him. Being truthful was a form of nakedness he could not bear: you were exposed, you were weakened, you’d be ridiculed or scolded. Seeing Charlie Miller explaining to his father exactly what had happened with the bayonet, that truthfulness ended in Charlie’s ­father’s sulking and silence. And a greater reason for resisting was that grown-ups were themselves strict keepers of secrets—Joe’s father’s disappearances and false promises, his mother saying “I’m exhausted” when she was drunk. They lied; he said nothing, yet his silences were not lies but evasions. Someday he would be strong—in his heart he wanted to be a hero, and wished he knew how. But for now he did not want anyone to know him.

One incident, to his shame, could not be kept secret. Long before it happened, his dread of it, and sharpness of his fear, convinced him that he would face it and be harmed. He possessed the accurate premonition of a frightened person, in the way that someone fearful about tipping over a precious teacup on a tray is certain to bobble it and break it.

It was a dog. What moment, what catch or tremor in the past, had imprinted on him a fear of dogs? Maybe a guard dog slavering on a leash and growling, tugging a soldier past the fence of a base somewhere. It was first of all the sound of them, the hoarse bark that gnawed at his throat, the dog’s bark that said, I am coming for you.