I made it through the long week of death and dismay – miraculously. The weather had turned suddenly hot and dry. Our faces and hands were sunburnt and peeling. The heat might have been the worst of it, which is saying something because all of it was pretty terrible. I was changing in ways that made my job easier even as it ruined me. I’d been alternately elated and terrified through the whole of that time, practising, just as Bellair had instructed me, a strategy for wrathful courage that involved an elaborate construction about my father’s disgust for me. In this way, I learned to be a good soldier. I learned to kill. I found that when I recalled my father hitting me, I could s***h and shoot the hurt away, such that, and I am not proud of this, the killing of other men became a sort of ba
