He hadn’t been anything but tired and scared for six months and he’d lost a lot, mostly people, and seen far too much, but he was breathing in and breathing out, some kind of choice all by itself. He had one of those faces; I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the colour drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn’t wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old.
