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alive, looking for an enemy to fire upon.
    “Keep those pieces still! Keep ’em down!” Sergeant Simpson’s voice had changed. He barked commands. “Get into the camp! Get into the camp!” Brunner was dragging somebody. I looked behind me. I couldn’t see anything. It was light out, but all I could see was a few feet in front of me. My vision didn’t go any further.
    We got back to the camp. Two sergeants opened the barbed wire fence. They pulled the wounded man in. I looked.
    There was a shard of metal protruding from Jenkins’ chest. The blood gurgled out of the wound it made and sprayed along the concave metallic surface. He tried to bring his hand to it, to touch it. A medic had reached him and pushed his hand away. Jenkins’ face was white and twisted as he struggled to look down at his wound. There were bubbles on the wound as he struggled for a final breath, and then that, too, stopped.

Chapter 4
    “You got the tags?” The supply guy had a long face and his mouth twisted oddly when he spoke.
    “How many bags you got there?” There was a neat stack of dark bags on the shelf.
    “Enough,” he said, handing me the heavy plastic bag. “What he do, step on a mine?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That’s what happens,” he said. “They sneak in and plant a mine on your path, and you don’t know where the hell to walk.”
    “Oh.”
    I took the bag out to where Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll waited. They lifted Jenkins by the shoulders of his uniform. Sergeant Simpson used a first aid patch to pick up something that had erupted from the hellish wound on Jenkins’ chest and fallen on the ground near him. He placed it in the bag at his side.
    I thought I would throw up. I stood along with the other guys in the squad until the bag had been zipped up. We started back to the hooch. On the way I looked back at the body bag again. Sergeant Simpson and Lieutenant Carroll were talking together, the body bag was at their feet. I turned away and went to the hooch.
    Monaco came over and sat on the edge of my bunk. For a while he didn’t say anything. Then he put his hand on my shoulder.
    “You know him?”
    “No,” I said. “I just met him at the replacement company.”
    “Sometimes it goes like that,” Monaco said. He started to say something else, then shrugged it off, and left.
    I wanted to say more to him. I wanted to say that the only dead person I had ever seen before had been my grandmother. I wanted to say that when I saw her I was ready, walking into the darkened church with the family and sitting in the first pews. But Jenkins was different. Jenkins had been walking with me and talking with me only hours before. Seeing him lying there like that, his mouth and eyes open, had grabbed something inside my chest and twisted it hard.
    The neat pile of body bags was waiting for the rest of us. There were enough there — the supply clerk had reached for the top one without even looking — to know that they expected that many of us would be going home in them.
    I didn’t know what to think about what had happened. I didn’t know what to feel. I touched my fingers to the palm of my hand. I could feel my fingers. It was only inside that I was numb.
    Lieutenant Carroll, our platoon leader, came in. He was a quiet guy, with dark hair and dark, calm eyes and an uneasy smile. I never felt that he was comfortable with himself. I hadn’t had a chance to talk with him yet, but sometimes I would see him drift off into his own daydreams and be embarrassed when we caught him at it.
    When the old guys — the guys that had been through it before — saw him, they put their cards down, and their magazines, and gathered around him. I got up and nudged Peewee, who was lying facedown on his bunk.
    Lieutenant Carroll took off his helmet and bowed his head.
    “Lord, let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, OLord,