The transition from the dry, suffocating dust of Texas to the humid, suffocating rot of the Louisiana swamps happened in the back of a canvas-covered deuce-and-a-half. By the time they hit the mud, the humidity had already reclaimed the air, turning it into something thick and grey that clung to their lungs.
Tommy felt the shift in his boots first. The red clay of Texas had been stubborn, but the mud of Louisiana was hungry. It sucked at his heels, eager to pull him down into the stagnant, black water that pooled between the cypress knees.
"Eyes front, Jensen!" Mac’s voice didn’t carry—it cut through the hum of the swamp insects like a razor. "You’re looking at the muck, you’re looking at your own grave.
Keep your eyes on the man in front of you."
Tommy snapped his chin up, his M1 Garand feeling twice as heavy as it had the day before. Beside him, Morales was struggling to keep his canteen from rattling against his webbing. The man’s face was a mask of sweat and irritation.
"I signed up to fight Nazis, Sarge," Morales muttered, his voice barely audible over the wet thwack of boots hitting mud. "Not to be a swamp rat. I’m pretty sure I saw a gator back there that was bigger than my mother-in-law."
"Shut it, Morales," Mac said, not breaking stride. "You think the Germans are going to meet us in a dry parlor? You think they’ll wait for a breeze before they put a shell in your house? We live in the mud now. You learn to breathe the rot, or you drown in it."
The platoon moved in a ragged, staggered column. They were supposed to be "The Iron Men," a moniker Mac had tossed around ironically during inspection, but right now they were just ghosts in wool uniforms, smelling of sweat, mildew, and the metallic tang of uncleaned rifles.
The obstacle course wasn't an obstacle course in the traditional sense. There were no white-washed logs or neatly raked pits. This was raw, untamed bottomland. They were tasked with navigating a half-mile of dense, flooded thicket while keeping their weapons dry and their formation tight.
"Spread out!" Mac barked. "Five yards, Jensen! Keep your spacing, or a single mortar round turns this whole squad into a stew."
Tommy shifted to the left, pushing through a dense wall of hanging moss. The air felt heavy, like it was filled with wet wool. He stumbled over an underwater root, his shoulder slamming into a sapling. The pain was sharp, but the fear was sharper—he instinctively reached out to steady himself, his hand sliding off the moss-covered bark. He looked back. Behind him, he saw the blurry silhouettes of the other men. For a second, he didn't see Morales or the others. He saw silhouettes of casualties, men draped over the landscape like broken toys.
He blinked, shaking the thought away. Focus.
"Move!" Mac shouted, his silhouette emerging from the gloom ahead. He stood on a slightly elevated patch of drier earth, his eyes scanning the men like a hawk. He wasn't helping anyone. He was watching for the weak link.
Tommy saw the man in front of him, a kid named Miller from Kentucky, falter.
Miller’s boot went deep into a soft patch, and he tipped backward, his rifle dipping dangerously close to the black water.
Tommy didn't think. He lunged forward, catching Miller by the webbing of his pack just as he started to slide. He hauled him back with a grunt, his own boots sinking deep.
"Gotcha," Tommy hissed.
"Thanks, man," Miller breathed, his eyes wide.
"Don't thank me," Tommy said, the realization hitting him with the force of a physical blow. "Just don't let me sink when I go down."
Mac was there in an instant, but he didn't offer a hand. He just stared at them, his expression unreadable beneath the brim of his helmet. "You’re a team, or you’re corpses. Miller, you’re dead weight if you can’t walk. Jensen, you’re dead if you don't watch his back. That's the math. Learn it now, or the German artillery will teach it to you in blood."
The day turned into a blur of exhaustion. The squad crawled through knee-deep muck, dragged themselves under tangled vines that felt like barbed wire, and lugged their packs through water that reached their waists. Every time Tommy felt he couldn't take another step, he looked at the back of Miller’s helmet, or heard the rhythmic, cynical cursing of Morales a few yards behind him.
His individuality was being stripped away, layer by layer, shed like his damp, chafing undershirt. He wasn't Tommy Jensen from the farm anymore. He was a component.
He was a piece of a larger, jagged machine designed for one purpose.
As the sun began to dip, casting long, bruised purple shadows across the swamp, they finally reached the designated extraction point—a small, muddy clearing. They collapsed, chests heaving, lungs burning.
Morales sat back against a cypress tree, wiping a streak of black mud from his cheek. "You know, Sarge," he wheezed, "if we get to the front, do we get to use our rifles, or are we just going to wrestle the Krauts into the mud until they die of boredom?"
Mac didn't smile. He walked down the line, checking equipment. He stopped in front of Tommy. He reached down and ran a gloved finger along the bolt of Tommy’s rifle. It was dry. Clean.
"You did good, Jensen," Mac said quietly, his voice lacking the usual bite. "You caught Miller."
"Just did what needed doing, Sarge."
"That’s all there is," Mac replied, looking out over the stagnant water. "Everybody thinks war is about glory or killing or hating the other guy. It’s not. It’s about being the man who catches the other man when he falls. You learn that, you’ve got a chance."
Tommy looked at his hands. They were trembling, covered in a mixture of swamp silt and his own sweat. He looked at the others. They were all broken in their own way—gaunt, filthy, and utterly hollowed out. But they were sitting in a circle, their rifles positioned outward, a perimeter formed by instinct.
The quiet of the swamp felt heavy, oppressive, and for the first time, Tommy didn't want to be back on the farm. The silence of the Iowa fields felt distant, small, and irrelevant compared to the visceral, suffocating reality of the life he had chosen. He realized then that he wouldn't be able to go back to who he was. Even if he survived the war, the person who had left the farm was dead, buried somewhere in the Louisiana mud, replaced by this version—someone who viewed the world through the sights of a weapon and measured life by the distance between himself and his squad.
"Sarge?" Tommy asked, his voice steadying.
"Yeah, Jensen?"
"What’s next?"
Mac took a long, slow breath, looking toward the dark tree line. "Next? Next is altitude, boy. Next is thin air where you can’t catch your breath, and cold that makes your bones ache. We aren't finished molding you yet."
The squad stood up, their bodies moving in a strange, synchronized unison. They didn't need orders to gather their gear. They didn't need to be told to check their fire. They simply existed as a unit, a single organism breathing in the dark, waiting for the next command that would take them one step closer to the end of the world.
The air in the Colorado Rockies didn’t just grow thin; it grew hostile. It was a sharp, crystalline substance that tasted of pine needles and old stone, biting into the lungs with every ragged inhalation.
Tommy Jensen adjusted his pack, the weight of the M1 Garand and the extra mortar rounds for Morales grinding his shoulders into a dull, pulsing ache. Around him, the forest had thinned into a jagged landscape of granite teeth and frozen, treacherous scree. The lush, suffocating rot of the Louisiana swamps was a memory, replaced now by a world that felt like the surface of a dead planet.
Mac walked ten paces ahead, his gait steady, a rhythmic, mechanical swing that defied the steep incline. He didn't look back. He didn't have to. The squad moved behind him in a loose, jagged file, their breathing synced to the crunch of boots on frost-heaved earth.
"Hey, Jensen," Morales hissed from behind, his voice raspy, fighting the thin air. "I think the altitude’s finally got to my brain. I’m starting to think this mountain is actually a giant grave marker. Maybe they brought us up here to make sure we’re already halfway to heaven before we even ship out."
"Stow it, Bobby," Tommy murmured, keeping his eyes on the back of Mac’s salt-stained jacket.
"No, really," Morales wheezed, a sharp, humorless laugh bubbling in his chest.
"Look at the trees. Nothing grows up here but things that are too stubborn or too stupid to die. We’re in good company, huh?"
Tommy didn't respond. He had stopped looking for answers in the words of his squadmates weeks ago. The silence had become the primary language of the 377th. They were no longer individuals struggling for oxygen; they were a singular, lunging pulse of heavy wool and sweat-soaked fatigue.
They reached a narrow ridge, a sheer drop on the left that vanished into a shroud of swirling, grey clouds. Mac halted, raising a gloved hand. The squad collapsed into the rocks, the only sound the clatter of gear and the frantic, shallow gasps of men fighting to pull oxygen from the void.
Mac crouched, his eyes scanning the horizon. His face was a map of etched lines, the skin weathered to the consistency of cured leather. He turned back, his gaze lingering on each of them for a fraction of a second longer than necessary.
"Check your boots," Mac said, his voice flat, stripped of the cadence of drill instructors. "Check your socks. If you’ve got a blister, you fix it now, or you lose the foot before we’re even across the water. You lose a foot, you lose your squad. You lose your squad, you’re dead."
Billy, the youngest of them, fumbled with his laces, his fingers trembling and blue-tipped from the cold. He looked up, his eyes wide and glassy. "Sergeant, the map said we’d reach the summit by nightfall. We’re nowhere near."
Mac leaned in, his shadow eclipsing the boy. "The map is a piece of paper, Thompson. The mountain is the reality. You stop thinking about the summit and start thinking about the next step. Just the next one. You let your mind drift to the finish line, you’ll slip on the ice and take the rest of us with you."
Mac stood, pointing toward the ridgeline. "Move out. Double time."
The exertion was instantaneous. Tommy felt the familiar, dull throb of his muscles, but he pushed it into a compartment of his mind labeled 'irrelevant.' This was the change: the physical self had become a tool, a mechanism that could be pushed until it sparked, then pushed again.
As they ascended, the temperature plummeted. A wet, sleeting snow began to drift horizontally, masking the path. They moved not as a line of men, but as a chain—each link dependent on the tension of the one ahead. When Miller stumbled on a patch of slick black ice, Tommy didn't think; he reached out, caught the strap of Miller’s pack, and hauled him upright in one fluid motion, never breaking stride. Miller didn't thank him. He just grunted and leaned harder into the ascent.
That was the brotherhood now. Not words, not shared stories by a fire, but the instinctive, silent geometry of survival.
By the time they crested the ridge, the sun was a dying ember, bleeding orange across a jagged, frozen horizon. They didn't stop to admire it. They reached the designated bivouac point—a shallow depression sheltered by a wall of wind-scoured rock—and went to work with the economy of machines.
Two men set the mortar, two men dug, two men kept watch. No one talked about the, 'if' anymore. The vocabulary of their existence had shifted. They spoke of fields of fire, of windage, of ammunition loadouts, and the cold. They were preparing, in the deepest, most primal sense of the word, to cease being citizens of a country and become residents of a battlefield.
Tommy found himself sitting on a rock, cleaning his rifle for the third time that day.
His hands worked of their own accord, field-stripping the M1 with a grace that felt foreign,
like a skill he had possessed in another life.
Morales sat nearby, struggling to light a cigarette with frozen fingers. He finally got it to catch, the orange tip glowing like a tiny, defiant star in the blue twilight. He took a long drag and exhaled, the smoke swirling into the freezing air.
"You ever wonder what they’re doing back in Iowa right now?" Morales asked, his
voice unexpectedly quiet.
Tommy stared at the firing pin in his palm. "Harvesting, maybe. Fixing fences."
"Yeah," Morales chuckled, a brittle sound. "Fixing fences. Seems like a dream, doesn't it? Like something we saw in a movie once."
"It’s not a dream," Tommy said, his voice hard. "It’s just somewhere else. A different world."
"And this?" Morales swept a hand toward the vast, indifferent peaks surrounding them. "This is our world now. The dirt, the cold, and the gear. We’re not people anymore, Tommy. We’re just the stuff the Army carries to the fight."
Tommy looked up. Below them, the world fell away into an endless, dark expanse of forest, indistinguishable from the shadows. The sheer scale of it was suffocating. He realized then that he couldn't remember the name of the girl he’d danced with at the local fair before he left. The face was blurring, the name sliding away like water over glass. The only faces that remained sharp, illuminated by the cold light of the stars, were the men sitting in the circle around him.
Mac approached, carrying a thermos of coffee, the steam rising in a thin, ethereal column. He sat down between them, his presence an anchor. He didn't offer the coffee; he didn't need to. He just sat, staring out at the darkness.
"They're going to push us harder when we get to the boats," Mac said, his voice barely audible over the rising wind. "They’re going to tell us it’s about duty, or flags, or saving the world. Forget that."
Tommy looked at him, surprised by the candor.
"You don't fight for the flag," Mac continued, his eyes fixed on the distant, shimmering snow of the high peaks. "You fight for the man to your left. You fight so that when the world ends—and it will end, for every one of us, eventually—you’re the one holding the line. You keep each other warm, you keep each other fed, and you keep each other alive until the job is done. That’s the only truth you’re going to find out there."
Mac took a long, steadying breath, the cold air rattling in his chest. "We’re not going to be the same when this is over. If we’re lucky, we’ll be empty. If we’re not, we’ll be haunted. Either way, the boys who walked into the swamps in Louisiana are already dead. We’re just the ghosts waiting for the final curtain."
Silence returned, heavier than the cold. Tommy looked at his hands—calloused, dirt-stained, steady as rock. He didn't feel the fear he had expected to feel. There was no terror, no surging adrenaline. There was only a profound, hollow resolve.
He looked at Miller, who was shivering in his sleep, and at Billy, who was staring at the ground, his jaw clenched against the frost. He felt a sudden, sharp ache in his chest—not for himself, but for the weight of them. He was their peer, their brother, and if the time came, he would be their leader.
He pulled his wool coat tighter around his frame. He wasn't the farm boy from Iowa anymore. He was an Iron Man, forged in the heat of a machine, tempered in the freezing thin air of the peaks.
"Tomorrow," Tommy said, his voice cutting through the wind, "we summit."
Mac nodded, a grim, ghost of a smile touching his lips. "Tomorrow, we summit. And then, we go to war."
Tommy looked out at the vast, silent peaks one last time. He wasn't looking at the horizon anymore. He was looking at the void, and for the first time, he didn't flinch. He leaned back against the stone, closed his eyes, and let the rhythmic, synchronized breathing of the squad pull him into the dark. There was no past, no future. There was only the cold, the rock, and the men who would die to keep him whole. The transformation was complete. The iron was set.
Crossing the Atlantic: Expectations, sea-sickness, and the quiet fear of the unknown.
The transition from the mountain air of Colorado to the salt-slicked concrete of the Brooklyn Navy Yard was not a journey; it was an eviction. The transition happened in a blur of train whistles, lukewarm coffee in paper cups, and the sight of civilian life receding like a tide leaving them stranded on a desolate shore.
The troop transport ship, a slab-sided grey leviathan named the USAT General Brooke , loomed over the pier. It didn't look like a vessel designed for men; it looked like a factory for casualties.
Tommy stood on the wooden ramp, his duffel bag biting into his shoulder. Behind him, Morales looked up at the towering steel hull, his face a mask of practiced indifference that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"Looks like a floating coffin," Morales muttered, adjusting his pack. "You know, statistically, the submarine is the most efficient way to turn a man into fish food. I hope the Navy checked the hull for pinholes."
"Stow it, Bobby," Mac said. The Sergeant’s voice was clipped, devoid of his usual dry warmth. He didn't look at the ship. He looked at the horizon, his eyes scanning the grey, choppy water of the harbor as if he were already measuring the distance to the enemy.
"Just saying, Sarge. The accommodations leave a lot to be desired."
"The accommodations are a berth and a ration," Mac said, stepping onto the metal gangplank. "And we’re going to be living in worse before we’re through. Move."
As Tommy stepped onto the deck, the world tilted. The ship groaned under the strain of the tide, a deep, rhythmic thrumming that resonated through the soles of his boots.
The bustle of the harbor was chaotic—thousands of men in olive drab, their voices swallowed by the shouting of NCOs, the screech of gulls, and the incessant clanging of winches.
They were herded down narrow, vertiginous stairwells into the bowels of the ship.
The air grew thick, humid, and heavy with the scent of floor wax, diesel fumes, and the sour, unwashed sweat of hundreds of men crammed into too small a space.
"Compartment C-4," an MP barked, gesturing toward a yawning dark hatch.
They descended into a cavernous hold lined with tiers of canvas bunks, stacked four high, squeezed so tightly together that a man couldn't turn over without hitting the steel strut of the frame above him. It was a space designed for maximum density, a place where individuality was stripped away by the sheer pressure of proximity.
Billy "Kid" Thompson scrambled for a lower bunk, his face pale. He looked small, his uniform slightly too large for his frame, his eyes wide as he looked at the rows of sleeping sacks. "Is this it?" he whispered to Tommy, who was struggling to wedge his gear into the sliver of space beneath his assigned bunk. "For the next two weeks?"
"For however long it takes," Tommy said, his voice flat. He felt the cold iron of the ship against his palm. He looked around and saw the other men—the rest of the squad, and the men of the platoon they barely knew—staring at the metal ceilings.
There was no room for the banter of the Colorado ridges here. The lack of space was a physical weight. Every movement was a negotiation; every breath was shared with a dozen others. Tommy realized, with a sudden, sinking clarity, that he was no longer an inhabitant of the earth. He was cargo.
Mac climbed into the bunk directly across from Tommy. He didn't bother unpacking. He just unlaced his boots, set them neatly beneath the canvas, and laid his helmet on his chest.
"Get some sleep, Jensen," Mac said, his eyes closed. "The noise won't stop, and neither will the ship. Don't fight it."
"Hard to sleep, Sarge," Tommy said, watching a bead of condensation drip from a pipe onto the deck. "It feels like we're already underwater."
"That’s the point," Mac murmured. "You’re in the machine now. It’s got a schedule, and you’re just a cog. Close your eyes."
Tommy closed his eyes, but he couldn't block out the ship. The General Brooke was alive. It creaked and groaned, a sentient beast of iron that shivered as the first engines roared to life. He felt the vibration in his spine. He thought of the farm in Iowa—the vast, still fields, the silence of the night, the way the wind moved through the corn. It felt like a memory from a different life, one belonging to a boy who didn't know what a troop transport smelled like.
A few hours later, the vibration changed pitch. The steady, percussive pounding of the harbor tugs vanished, replaced by the deep, rhythmic hum of the open sea. The ship gave a slow, deliberate roll—a long, agonizing tilt that sent a collective groan through the compartment.
Morales, who had been sitting on his bunk, suddenly turned green. He stood up, stumbled, and grabbed a support beam. "Oh, that’s not right," he choked out, his humor failing him for the first time. "That’s not right at all."
"Sit down, Morales," Mac commanded, not opening his eyes.
"I can't, Sarge. I need air. I need—"
"You need to stay put. If you puke, you’re cleaning it. Sit."
Morales sat, burying his face in his hands. The air in the compartment began to grow worse—the sharp, metallic tang of diesel mixing with the sudden, wretched scent of bile as a man in the far corner began to retch uncontrollably into his helmet.
Tommy lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head. He watched the shadows of the pipes move across the ceiling as the ship pitched. He thought about the men around him. He could hear them breathing—the shallow, rapid gasps of the nervous, the deep, ragged snores of the exhausted, and the wet, stifled sobs of those who were finally realizing that they weren't coming home for a long, long time.
He reached out and touched the steel wall of the ship. It was vibrating, a constant, low-frequency hum that vibrated through his fingertips and into his marrow. It was the sound of progress. It was the sound of the war.
He didn't feel brave. He didn't feel like an "Iron Man." He felt like a ghost, suspended in a dark, iron belly, moving across a vast, uncaring ocean toward a horizon that promised only violence. The predictability of the training—the march, the drill, the summit—was gone. In its place was this: the grey, suffocating uncertainty of the Atlantic.
He closed his eyes, but the sensation of motion didn't stop. The ship dipped again, deeper this time, and a wave slammed against the hull with a force that shook the entire deck. A dull thud reverberated through the hold, a sound that Tommy knew would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
"We’re out of sight of land, aren't we?" Billy whispered from below.
Tommy didn't answer. He didn't have to. The ship’s pitch, the rhythm of the waves, and the heavy, silent weight of the men in the hold told him everything he needed to know.
The world they had known was gone. There was only the General Brooke , the cold iron, and the vast, dark water waiting for them on the other side.
Tommy tightened his grip on his blanket and let the roll of the ship carry him, drifting into a fitful, shallow sleep, waiting for the dawn that would look exactly the same as the night.
The General Brooke was a cavernous, steel-walled lung, and it seemed determined to exhale its contents into the churning grey void of the Atlantic.
Tommy woke not to a bugle, but to the rhythmic, sickening groan of the ship’s hull, a sound like a giant grinding its teeth. He rolled off his rack, his boots finding purchase on a deck slicked with a film of sweat, spilled salt water, and the pungent, unmistakable irony of bile. The air was a thick soup of unwashed bodies and diesel fumes, heavy enough to chew.
Across the narrow aisle, Bobby Morales was slumped over his duffel, his face the color of wet newsprint. The mortarman’s usual sharp-edged cynicism had been sanded down into a hollow, translucent misery. He didn’t look up when Tommy shoved a canteen toward him.
"Save it, farm boy," Bobby croaked, his voice barely a rasp. "Unless that’s got gin in it, I’m just going to send it right back to the ocean floor."
"Drink," Tommy said, his own voice sounding thin and alien to his ears. "Mac says if we get dehydrated, we’re just lead weights when we hit the beach. I don’t feel like carrying your gear on top of my own, Bobby."
Bobby let out a weak, hacking laugh that quickly dissolved into a grimace of nausea. He took the canteen anyway, his hands shaking with a tremor that had nothing to do with the ship’s roll. "The beach. Right. Assuming the U-boats don’t decide we look better as a reef."
"Stow the talk," a voice rumbled from the shadows of the upper rack.
Sergeant McGregor slid down with a practiced, heavy grace that defied the erratic tossing of the ship. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, his eyes rimmed with the red fatigue of constant, silent monitoring. He didn't look sick; he looked like a man made of tempered steel, immune to the rot of the sea.
"We’re two days out from the coast," Mac said, his eyes scanning the squad’s bunks—the twitching fingers, the pale faces, the young men huddled into fetal positions against the metal frames. "This is the part they don’t tell you about in the pamphlets. They talk about glory, about the uniform, about the clean, sharp lines of a parade. They don't mention that the war starts with five days of puking your guts out in the dark."
Billy "Kid" Thompson, shoved into a corner bunk, let out a shaky breath. He had his hands clamped over his stomach, his eyes wide and unblinking, staring at a bulkhead rivet as if it held the secrets of the universe. "Do you think they’re waiting for us?" Billy asked. "The Germans? On the other side?"
"They’re waiting," Mac said flatly, pulling a whetstone from his pocket and beginning a rhythmic, hypnotic shhh-tink, shhh-tink against his bayonet. "They’re always waiting. That’s the nature of the beast. But tonight, the only thing trying to kill you is the ocean. Focus on that. Keep your gear dry. Keep your boots laced. When we hit the harbor, you don’t want to be fumbling with your laces while the ramp goes down."
Tommy watched the whetstone. The sound was the only thing in the hold that felt stable. The ship bucked—a violent, shuddering heave that sent a chorus of groans echoing through the hold. A crate of supplies shifted in the corridor, a heavy wooden thud that sounded, for a split second, like an explosion.
The reaction was instantaneous. Every man in the bay—a dozen tired, broken soldiers—flinched. Muscles coiled. Hands reached for rifles that weren't there, or gripped the edges of bunks until knuckles turned ivory.
It lasted three seconds. Then, the realization set in. It was just the ship. Just the sea.
Bobby squeezed his eyes shut, his forehead slick with cold sweat. "I’m going to die," he muttered, not to anyone in particular. "I’m going to die in a tin can, and they’re going to bury me in a sack of salted pork."
"Shut it," Mac commanded, though there was no malice in his voice, only a weary finality. "Nobody’s dying today. Today, we’re just miserable. Tomorrow, we’re just hungry. But the moment we hit that harbor, the misery stops. We put on the gear. We put on the face. You don't get to be a boy from Iowa or a joker from the block anymore. You’re infantry. You’re the 377th. That means you’re the rock that the wave breaks against, not the foam that gets washed away."
Tommy looked at his own hands. They were calloused, dirty, and trembling just a fraction. He thought of the farmhouse in Iowa, the way the wheat fields looked under a harvest moon—still, gold, and eternal. It felt like a memory from a different life, a dream experienced by a man who had long since ceased to exist.
He leaned his head back against the cold steel of the ship's frame. He felt the ship’s engines thrumming deep in his marrow. They were moving closer to the fire, moving away from the silence of his past and into the deafening roar of a future he wasn't sure he could survive.
"Tommy," Mac called out softly, breaking through the young man’s trance.
Tommy shifted his gaze. Mac was looking at him—not as a superior, but as a man who needed to see something in someone else to convince himself it was still there.
"Check the ventilation," Mac said, gesturing toward the overhead pipes. "See if you can get that hatch open just an inch. The air in here is turning. If we don’t get some circulation, we’re going to lose half the squad to the heat before we ever see a Kraut."
It was a small, menial task—a distraction, a way to keep him grounded. Tommy nodded, pushed himself up, and began the slow, torturous process of navigating the swaying, slippery deck toward the hatch. He moved carefully, his boots sliding, his heart drumming a slow, steady rhythm against his ribs.
As he worked the latch, he glanced back at the squad. Billy was still staring at the rivet. Bobby had his head in his hands. Mac was still sharpening his blade, his face an immovable mask of stoic resolve.
Tommy hit the latch, and a spray of cold, stinging salt mist whipped into the hold, instantly displacing the humid, wretched stench of the interior. He gasped as the shock of it hit his lungs.
Through the narrow slit, he couldn't see land. He couldn't see lights. He couldn't see the enemy. He saw only the endless, roiling black of the Atlantic, a cold expanse that swallowed everything whole.
He stayed there for a moment, the sea-spray matting his hair, his eyes stinging. He realized then that the fear wasn't about the enemy. The enemy was an idea, a distant shadow. The fear was this—the complete loss of control, the way the world had shrunk to a steel box in the middle of a graveyard, and the terrifying certainty that when the box finally opened, the man who stepped out would never be able to come home.
He closed the hatch, turned back, and saw Mac watching him. The Sergeant didn’t smile. He just gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
Keep your eyes forward, the gesture said.
Tommy sat back down, his breath hitching in his chest. He pulled his wool coat tighter, closed his eyes, and tried to find that quiet, golden field in Iowa one last time. It was fading, replaced by the grit of the hull, the smell of cordite, and the relentless, driving momentum of a war that had finally caught up to them.