John was right. Even on the ride over, Tom paid special attention to his surroundings and already, his spirits were lifted. The warm aroma of yeast had wafted from a bakery window. Children’s voices had echoed from a nearby alley, their British words and accents still a novelty that surprised him every time. The River Kennet had glistened as he traveled along its gravel path.

He could imagine easily enough that he was back home in Virginia with a front porch view of the Chickahominy River and that his mother had peach pie warming in the oven. Always a treat after an afternoon of picking the fruit in their orchard. The best ones were reserved for the market, and the bruised ones were held back for baking. His father would be sitting at his desk reading the newspaper, an armchair commentator on every decision President Roosevelt made. Opinions informed, at least, by his own military experience.

His father had been so eager for Tom to enlist, following family tradition. And Tom had never questioned that he would do otherwise. Photographs of Powell ancestors from as far back as the Civil War crowded the mantel of the redbrick fireplace at their home, and stories dating back to the Jamestown settlement taunted Tom to be among the next generation of heroes.

“A career in the military is the only path for a man,” his father was famous for saying. The patriarchal enthusiasm was tempered only by his mother, who insisted that Tom go to college before joining up. A tactic that Tom knew was merely the desperate wish of a mother’s heart to delay her son buttoning up a uniform.

But a master’s degree in history was not likely to do much good when rifle met rifle. The time to step out from behind a desk had come and Tom was ready.

Like his classmates, he’d grown up playing cops and robbers at recess and painting diecast soldiers, reenacting stories they heard at their dinner tables and read in their textbooks. But when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor nearly two years ago, the recreational aspect of exploring one’s fledgling manhood was put to the test. And the all-too-real prospect of going to war became a silent terror concealed by outward bravado.

Would his father be happier if he made it home safely or if he died gloriously on the battlefield?

As to his own feelings about it, they were drowned in the brackish waters of his parents’ conflicting expectations, laid out since the day the doctor had declared, “It’s a boy!”

He’d done his best to please them ever since.