McDongle

The Australians called me "Frenchie," which was wrong twice over, but I stopped correcting them somewhere around the second week of rain. Belgium was a word I'd left in a drawer back home, folded up with my mother's letters and a photograph nobody had bothered to look at since. Out here I was just another set of boots in a column of boots, marching under somebody else's flag toward somebody else's war, and the joke of it was that I'd volunteered. Nobody conscripts a man into a country that isn't his. I'd crossed an ocean to find the same mud I'd run from, only now it came with better cigarettes and men who laughed too loud, too often, the way you do when you've made peace with dying badly. They were good men. That was the problem. Good men have a habit of getting killed in front of you, and then you're the one left carrying their names around like stones in your pockets, and every step you take you sink a little deeper.