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the ground turned to mud again, one soldier would walk down a path that a thousand men had already tramped and have his feet ripped out from under him. So you never walked safe, you never walked free. Mortars would come whistling down from the sky and he was sure he was dead, but although men around him died he seemed to dance between the snowflakes of shrapnel, waiting for the next one, and the next. On warmer days the shells would just sink into the mud.
    He said he was bound up in so many clothes that he could not effectively run or efficiently fight, that his mind was always thick, sluggish, because he was always tired. He did not talk about the politics of it, or at least if he did it did not register with me then. He did not rail against officers or badmouth MacArthur’s insane push into the north that brought the Chinese swarming onto them. He did not talk about things like honor, because while honor is a big thing to the gentility, it is not a word you hear much on the lips of poor whites. It is not that we do not know what it is, or have it, it is just one of those fifty-dollar words you don’t hear much. To my daddy, the war was an adventure gone bad, not a family heirloom.
    I remember that I asked him then why he had never talked about this war with my momma, and he said he had, but just one time. It was when he was fresh back from it, when the memories were still hot in his mind, and he tried to unburden himself to a new bride. He told her just one story, the worst of it, but if she ever shared the story with her sons I could not remember it. He said she probably thought we were just too little, that we would be scared. Maybe, he said, she was afraid it would give us bad dreams.
    I told him I was old enough to hear it now.
    H e remembered there was a moon that night, one of those winter nights when the sky was clear and mean and bright. He remembered it, because it was easy to get shot dead if you showed your silhouette on a night like that. They had heated rations and ate them mechanically, with spoons out of mess kits, like overgrown children. It was nice to think of home, on nights like that. At home in Alabama, his family would be sitting around the long table, the men pulling a little every now and then on a jug of whiskey as they waited for the cornbread to brown. He would have crawled home on his knees to smell that smell, even though he had been a picky eater and disdained such “country food.” He liked a good sandwich, what we called café food. But not having it made it taste good in his mind.
    The cold was worse on the clear nights. They camped on a flat place beside a river, almost within sight of the enemy on the other side. As wretched as the days were because of the cold and the fear and the sickness, the night was terror. The rivers froze, and at night the Chinese or North Koreans would inch their way across it, one or two at a time, and do their killing with knives. It was legend, those killings, designed to terrify.
    That night, or maybe it was morning, an assassin crept into his group, as he slept, and killed a man just inches away. My daddy reached out to shake him, maybe to shake him awake, and felt the blood that had leaked from his neck.
    He scrambled out of the shelter and into the biting cold, and saw him, the killer, on the ice.
    The man lay flat on his belly, to keep the ice from breaking, and slithered and squirmed like some kind of slow-moving reptile, just a few feet from the bank. My daddy ran down to the river’s edge and, unthinkingly, straight out onto the ice, slipping down hard on his hands and knees, hearing the ice crack. But he lunged forward and grabbed the man. They fought, frantic, crazy. My daddy must have lost his rifle because he never mentioned using it, and if he pulled his knife he never said. He knew the other man had a knife, had to have one, but my daddy did not see it. Maybe, in his rage, his terror, he did see it and didn’t care.
    Finally he fought to his