Maybe you’ll agree.

— M.A.C.

April 2003

Lucky indeed for America that in this theater and at that juncture she depended not on boys drafted or cajoled into fighting but on “tough guys” who had volunteered to fight and who asked for nothing better than to come to grips with the sneaking enemy who had aroused all their primitive instincts.

— Samuel Eliot Morison

History of the United States Naval Operations in World War II

Say a prayer for my pal Who died in Guadalcanal.

— Commonest of inscriptions among the hundreds of crosses in a cemetery on that island

If you don’t do like I say, you’ll get shot in the head.

— Frank Nitti

There’s no business like show business.

— Irving Berlin

My name was gone.

When I woke, I didn’t know where the hell I was. A small room with the pale green plaster walls and antiseptic smell of a hospital, yes, but what hospital? Where?

And then the damnedest thing happened: I couldn’t remember my name. Couldn’t remember for the life of me. It was gone.

There was nobody to ask about it. I was alone in the little room. Just me and three other beds, empty, neatly made, military fashion, a small bedside stand next to each. No pictures on any of the stands, though. No mirrors on the wall. How in hell did they expect a guy to know who he was without a mirror on the wall?

I sat up in bed, the horsehair mattress beneath me making an ungodly racket, working against itself like a bag of steel wool. My mouth had a bitter, medicinal taste. Maybe that was it; maybe I was so pumped full of medicine I was woozy. My name would come to me. It would come.