never knowing if one would end up stranded and starving in the freezing cold, forced to find food where it fell. Where it fell and closed its eyes to sleep and never opened them again, to be cut into pieces and boiled in salted water and choked down by mouths desperate to live. Forced to find food, to choke down the meat of a man he’d bunked alongside, only then understanding that what happened to his own father wasn’t an act of depravity so much as desperation, turning men into animals relying on survival instinct alone—
