Time stopped again. It seemed to split into many pieces. Kelly closed his eyes, in pain at first, and in that instant he was back on his hilltop overlooking SENDER GREEN, watching the NVA troops arrive; he was in his hospital bed looking at a photograph; he was outside some nameless village listening to the screams of children. He’d come home, all right, but to the same thing he’d left. No, he realized, to the thing that he had never left, which followed him everywhere he went. Held never get away from it because he’d never really finished it, not even once. Not even once.
