Sitting on hot turf is rough on your bum. The wild heat we had just six days before Thanksgiving came from nowhere. I would lean back with my hands behind me, but then that hot black rubber under the fake grass would stick to my hands, and I don’t want to look like Swamp Thing in front of the girl's lacrosse team from Buckhannon.  

When I first handed Bunt his M1941 Johnson Rifle, he took it with weak arms. Before our short boot camp, none of us had held a rifle with the intent of using it to take another man's life. Bunt held his rifle in his hands, staring at its brown stock where he would eventually rest it against his shoulder as he turned the world off for Germans who wanted nothing more than to do the same to him.