It begins in smoke and dust. The debris shaken from between bricks that threaten to topple from the nearby buildings at any moment. The sound of the explosion rings in her ears as she pulls herself from over the man she’d shielded. He is whimpering, but the bleeding has stopped. She touches his face for a moment before moving on to check on the men around him. There is dirt and blood everywhere, but she is not fazed by it. Triage has been a regular part of her life for nearly a year now and, after a while, her mind is able to hone in on the most pressing injuries. She looks for blooms in the green wool uniforms, blood from the nose, from the eyes. The cots are tight and her skirt catches on the edges every now and then.

She shuffles around other nurses and a few doctors, all of them leaning over a sea of green and red, clearing dust and checking faces. Every now and then, someone is carried out of the room and it is the silent, terrible acknowledgement of death that is the only thing that could bring her into the room with all of these people, into the moment.

When she settles again, refocused, her eyes do the initial sweep over another soldier, checking for signs of internal bleeding amongst the dust and mud. When she gets to his face, she realizes the soldier is smiling. Nearly blasted into the French sky and he’s smiling. His uniform is torn in four places and he is favoring his left side indicating a possible rib fracture, but you wouldn’t know it looking at him. All things considered, he seems relatively okay.

“You go see the captain over there, Nurse. He’s got a real nasty hole in his side.”

“Did you hit your head?”

“Probably, ma’am. But I’m alive and ain’t that something to smile about?”

The whole unit is moving in an attempt to evacuate the wounded before the fighting resumes. It’s an exercise in military precision, the tents up in an hour, men loaded into ambulances in two. She is checking the bandages around the head of a young private just months past his eighteenth birthday. She asks him questions about the family farm, about the girl he met in England before coming over here. He wants to go back to her after this is all over, and as she closes up the back of the ambulance, she hopes that he does.

When she turns again, the smiling soldier is behind her. It’s been a few days and he is smiling a lot less now that the sun has fallen on the day he managed to escape gunfire. Now there is a lot of moaning and blood and not as much adrenaline to get him through. His rib was broken in three places, and he walks around now with his chest wrapped and his arm pinned to his side to keep all of it in place. Despite the fact that he can walk, he is going to be evacuated to Britain as well, and he should have already gotten into the ambulance and started off on his journey. She looks at him curiously and he falls into step beside her. Injured men are given a sort of freedom that she quite likes to witness. They don’t have to fall in line because very few of them are able, but they are expected to interact with the nursing staff with a bit of decorum and respect. For some of the men, it seems difficult. Like they’ve never had to be kind to a woman in their lives. This soldier, Sergeant Baker, has an easy smile and a tanned, lightly freckled face. Without his hat and all the blood, he’s actually rather nice to look at.

“Sergeant, you should have been on the ambulance hours ago.”

“Don’t I know it. I couldn’t leave while some of my men are still here, though.”

“That’s very admirable, sir, but you aren’t in any condition to be dawdling here. There could be another bomb at any moment, and then where would you be? I’d have to shield you and I’ve only just gotten the dust out of my hair.” She says it with a smile which he returns and it’s a smile so wide she can see some of his back teeth. It’s the kind of smile that reminds her of a summer picnic and lemonade back home. It’s not the kind of smile she sees very often anymore.

“Nurse Draper, you are something else, ain’t ya?” He has a slight accent that she can’t place. Absolutely American, but from some region that lends itself to long vowels and deep voices. Biting her lip, she turns to the ambulance waiting to be settled and checked off the list. She wants to keep talking. To learn about the kind of man who would smile in a war zone. Instead, she waves up into the ambulance, indicating he should take a seat.

“If you haven’t got a girl at home, you can call me Julianne. And you can write me and I’ll tell you all about what kind of something else I am. But you’ve got to get on this ambulance first, Sergeant. Otherwise you might never get the chance.”

The Sergeant puts his free hand over his heart as if the thought of it is almost too much to bear. He is easy to talk to, not too fussy or serious. In the few days that she’s been able to observe him, he has busied himself by playing cards with the men who can sit upright, and reads old newspapers to the men who can’t. He chews the ends of his cigarettes and hasn’t touched a drink since arriving, despite the fact that French wine has found its way into the camp. It’s an overwhelming amount of goodness and charm, and she wouldn’t mind if he found himself at a little wooden desk back in Britain with a pen in his hand and her name on the page.

The first letter arrives nearly torn in half. It’s been a month since she’d last seen Sergeant Baker, and in the flurry of injuries, she’d nearly forgotten her invitation to write. Once she is able to piece the missive back together, her eyes follow the neat, looping script down the page and back again. He is practiced at saying things that mean something but don’t catch the ire of the censors. In fact, there is just one little square missing but she knows the location that has been censored. She keeps that letter in her clean laundry so no one else can read it or touch it. Over time, it becomes creased until the paper is soft as cotton. It is joined by seven others before she is sent back to Britain.

In the grey English evening, she meets with him again. His ribs are healed now and he wraps his arms around her in a hug. She would like him to kiss her square on the mouth in the middle of that street, but he does not. He holds her hand and leads her down streets. They eat dinner with so much laughter that people turn and stare at them. In the austere English pubs, there is joy but the American jollity is too much for them. Then he takes her home and kisses her once on the forehead, and she aches for him to ask for more. To hold her close and give her the same urgent, meaningful things that the threat of war had given them. When she turns away from him, he takes her hand again and pulls her in for a kiss, short but wild. And she could stay there with her eyes closed forever.

Their wedding is simple. Simpler than her parents were anticipating. Samuel does not come from wealthy stock and he is disinterested in leaving behind the comforts of military life after the war is over. They stay in Northern California, within a short car’s ride of the Presidio. He contracts work with the Navy despite being an Army man himself, and she volunteers in the hospitals until she is so round with child that the threat of giving birth on the tiled floors keeps her at home. She likes being pregnant. She likes being there when Samuel comes home, his eyes tired but his lips warm and welcoming. They speak of the fighting they have seen quietly, safe under the blankets. When things overwhelm them, they whisper and, on occasion, they cry. Because there is something freeing underneath layers of cotton, with one swollen belly between them and nothing else.

The news is alight with reports of war, again in Asia in a land she’s only heard of from girls whose husbands fought in the Pacific. Korea— a country split in half, severed by Communism or greed or whatever it is that causes people to begin wars. Julianne has stopped nursing. She’s hung up her green skirt for good and has no interest in returning to another war zone. Samuel, however, is impressed upon literally and figuratively. For him, it’s a duty that he can’t neglect, even if he sometimes wakes up in a cold sweat, speaking to her in broken, rudimentary French until she comes into better focus.

“Darling, I’ve been given orders.”

She understands orders. She just wishes he hadn’t been so eager to accept them. When she and baby Jerry see him off, he presses his forehead against hers until he is torn away from them by his transport. Her hand reaches out for him, but he is already too far gone. It’s different now than it was before. She’d met him on the worst day of his military career and it could only get better from then on. Now she was stuck in California where she couldn’t even shield him from the dangers he was going to face.

Days without Sam seem to stretch on into lifetimes, the sunlight wasted on the empty side of their bed. Jerry continues on oblivious and it is only Julianne who notices. The neighbors often stop by to talk to her about the weather, about the inane gossip of the neighborhood, but she finds it difficult to focus on much of anything at all. With an atlas in her lap at night, she tries to trace what she thinks is the most likely route they would take. How long do airplanes take to get to Korea?

The folded flag that is placed in her hands feels lighter than she thought it would. Compared to everything else that feels like lead anyway. Her fingers, clean and scrubbed, curl around the pristine stitched flag, which she clutches tightly to her chest. Next to her, her mother holds tightly onto Jerry who does not understand why they’ve been at the foggy graveyard all morning or why there are no children or snacks to keep him occupied. The service had been filled with a minefield of heart-wrenching moments. If she never hears TAPS again in her life, it would be too soon. It will haunt her in her dreams for months to come. Every firing gun or engine for the rest of her life will feel empty without twenty other shots behind it.

Long after her mother takes Jerry away and the black-clad mourners file out in one orderly line, she is alone with her husband’s dead body and the men tasked with lowering it into the ground. They watch her awkwardly, waiting for her to leave as well. But she sits where she’s sat for well over an hour now. Her ankles crossed, a flag pulled to her chest. With a little nod from her, the casket is lowered slowly. At one point, the top left corner dips lower than the others and there is a scramble to keep the whole thing from crashing deep into the trench in which he is buried. Julianne does not move. She breathes slowly and evenly. There is something to be said for the time between the arrival of the telegram and the funeral. It tales so long for a body to make it back to the States these days and when your husband dies, there is nothing but offers to babysit. There had been a whole day in which she was allowed to sob and call Sam the worst things she could think of all in the name of telling him she loved him and wished he’d come home breathing. She knows he’d understand.

Finally, there is a muffled thud as the casket touches the bottom of the grave. Again, the men at work turn to look at her, but she is already walking away, her heels unsteady in the grass, heading in the direction opposite her home. She is expected at the house soon. To accept condolences and glass pans of food she can not eat on her own. But she won’t make it. Instead, she walks as far her feet will carry her, and when she finally steps back into her home, it is dark both inside and out.