Tom had not thought of it that way before. Not when reading the newspapers as the United States considered whether or not to join the war effort. Not even during training, where his focus had been on learning all he could and proving himself to his father. Earning a place on the fireplace mantel.

But now that the plane rattled away in liftoff, now that the rumble of the engine drowned out any word spoken between the men, now that lightning flashed in the distance and the fear of crashing into the frigid waters below crept in, he imagined the people who had populated his youth and was determined to fight for them. To fight for their right to exist and thrive and have the same unworried life that Tom had enjoyed up until now.

In fact, it became the only thing to hold on to. As he looked around, every other soldier had his own method of coping with the fear none of them would admit to. One clutched the wooden beads of a rosary. Another wove an unlit cigarette back and forth through his fingers. One strummed a guitar that didn’t exist. And another puffed his chest in and out in an almost lionlike show of forced bravado as the man next to him sat stone-faced in terror.

All of them had black stripes painted across their faces, additional camouflage to their green army fatigues. But while their features were hidden and unrecognizable under the greasepaint, their anxieties were on display in this moment that delineated their passage from boys to men.

Boom!

The plane shook and Tom grabbed William’s arm with enough force to bruise him.

“Thunder?” he mouthed.

William shook his head. “Antiaircraft fire.”

Tom’s hands found their way to his seat and he gripped the cold metal edges.

So much for the element of surprise.

He was seated near the front and could see through the pilot’s window. Below them was a cloud cover so dense that he wouldn’t have known if they were already over land or still over water, save for the flashes of light refracted in the wet sky. The plane rattled with a terrible turbulence that was all the more terrifying because it was man-made. Someone down below—a faceless stranger—was firing into the sky hoping to shoot down other faceless strangers in a war that none of them had designed or particularly wanted. But as Tom looked around at the painted faces of his fellow soldiers, they were not anonymous. In fact, they were all sons and brothers. Some of them fathers. Which meant that the men on the ground were sons and brothers and fathers as well.

How could one greedy man cast the world into such a horror?

His heart, already clenched in fear, tightened even further at the tragedy unfolding. Humanity highjacked.