Hershel turned around his cap, put on a welder’s mask, and clipped a stringer-bead rod into the electrode holder of a rebuilt Nazi welding machine. Then he knelt down by a pipe joint and began a tack weld on the first of two hundred joints we would complete that day, the ball of reddish-yellow flame working its way around the circumference of the pipe. When he stood up and lifted the shield off his face, he was grinning so widely that I could have counted his teeth. “We just do’ed it, Loot,” he said. “Great God Almighty, we have done do’ed it.”
