Closer to the crater the bomb had dug, men hadn’t been so lucky. Some of what he saw might have come straight from a butcher’s shop. Butcher’s meat, though, didn’t scrabble frantically, trying to put itself back together. Butcher’s meat didn’t scream for its mother, either.

Fletch bent over and was noisily sick. Then he yelled, “Corpsmen! We need some corpsmen over here!” That shout was rising everywhere.

He bent again, this time by an injured man. With clumsy fingers, he put on a wound bandage to slow the soldier’s bleeding. Then, almost stabbing himself in the process, he gave the man a morphine injection. The wounded soldier sighed as the drug began to take hold.

Next to him, a sergeant was using a bayonet to cut another wounded man’s throat. Considering what the bomb had left of the young man, Armitage only nodded. The sergeant was doing him a favor.

After plunging the bayonet into the ground three or four times to clean it, the sergeant looked over to him. “How the hell are we supposed to get to our deployment area now, sir?” he asked.

The column was an abbatoir. Trucks burned. Others lay on their side or upside down. Guns had been flipped about like jackstraws. “Sergeant, I’ll be damned if I can tell you,” Fletch answered. “Truth is, I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive the last few minutes to care about anything else.”

“Yeah,” the noncom said. “But we better start caring PDQ, don’t you think?”

Fletch looked around again. He saw ruin and wreckage and slaughter. He looked up to the sky. He didn’t see any more Japanese planes, for which he heartily thanked God. But that didn’t mean the bastards with the meatballs wouldn’t come back again. He also didn’t see any American planes. That didn’t surprise him. The Japs must have swept them away like kids in second grade erasing a blackboard. How the hell was his force supposed to do anything if the Japs could hit it from above whenever they pleased?