Somewhere in Korea, 1951.

Dim figures lay scattered, most still, some moving, moaning softly, a few rending the air with hoarse shrieks, adrift, attenuated, desolate in souless suffering. The moon hung low, full but defaced with smoke and dust and the rising mist, a corpselight.

He stared ahead, seeing nothing, seeing too much. A leaden weariness made breath a burden. He did not bleed, but sensation had left him, burned from him by what he had witnessed. What he had done.

The attack had come just after midnight, the bugles screaming, the waves of Chinese lunging and stumbling up the slope. The mines had blown, the .30s and the M2s opened up with white tracers streaking, and the 80mm mortars whumped their shells onto the massed bodies. He crouched at his radio, shouting the ranges over the din, in the precise measured tones he had learned in Kansas over the equipment he had learned to use in Georgia. The fear, coppery-tasting, sickening, his bowels trembling. The world shattering as the  big shells came down, a curtain of flame on a darkened stage, the players so many broken marionets.

Limbs, torsos…heads. The moans. The shrieks. The darkness. The shame. They had died, and he had lived.

The faces did not look like his. The eyes were almond-shaped, dark, the hair dark, straight, so little like his wavy reddish waves, his mother’s hair, his grandmother’s hair. Not like his, not like theirs. And yet they had died, and he had seen them die. The fierce exultation. The clearing smoke. The human wreckage. The cries. The smell of blood and feces, and burnt meat. And the empty aftermath.

He stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, seeing everything. The moon rose slowly.