The water came up to my chest before I felt sand under my boots again, and even then I wasn’t sure the sand was real. Everything since the ramp dropped had the loose, sliding quality of a fever dream. The cold of the English Channel had already worked its way past my uniform and into my bones, and the noise around me, the engines and the surf and the distant crump of artillery, blurred into a single roar that I stopped trying to separate into parts.

I was twenty years old. I had been in England for six weeks, in the Army for fourteen months, and alive for the better part of two decades, and none of that had prepared me for the particular sensation of wading toward a beach I had only ever seen drawn in chalk on a briefing room wall.

We were a long way from home, all of us, in more ways than the obvious one. Most of the boys in my squad were Midwest farm kids or city boys from Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and somewhere in the crossing one of them had thrown up on my boot and apologized for it three separate times. His name was Daniel Hauser, and he was eighteen, and he had a habit of narrating things under his breath that I think helped him more than it helped anyone listening.

“Sand,” he said now, beside me, like he was confirming it to himself. “That’s sand. We made it to the sand.”

“We made it to the sand,” I agreed, because agreeing with Hauser seemed like the only useful thing I could offer him in that moment.

The morning was gray and the sky was full of noise we couldn’t see the source of, naval guns somewhere behind us throwing shells over our heads toward targets I couldn’t picture. I kept my eyes on the dune line ahead, low and pale, and I kept moving because the men around me kept moving, and there is a kind of courage that isn’t really courage at all but simply the unwillingness to be the one who stops.

We had expected worse. That was the strange truth of it, the thing nobody told you beforehand, that the waiting was worse than the doing. I had spent the crossing convinced I would die in the surf, shredded by machine gun fire the way the briefing officers had hinted at without quite saying, and instead the beach in front of us was eerily sparse, mortar fire scattered and undirected, like the Germans defending this stretch hadn’t expected us here at all. Later I would learn that the current had carried our landing craft more than a mile south of where we were supposed to be, that the whole invasion had gone sideways before it properly started, and that the mistake had likely saved most of our lives. At the time I only knew that the ground beneath the dune was less defended than we’d been told to fear, and I was grateful for it in the dumb, uncomplicated way a man is grateful for anything that lets him keep breathing.

A figure was moving along the waterline ahead of us, an older man, gray-haired beneath his helmet, walking with a cane and seemingly unbothered by the chaos breaking around him. I didn’t know his name then. I learned later he was a brigadier general, the assistant division commander, and that he had argued his way onto the first wave despite a heart condition that should have kept him in England. Someone near him shouted something about the wrong beach, about how we’d missed our mark, and his voice cut back across the sand, calm as a man discussing the weather.

“We’ll start the war from here.”

I didn’t understand the weight of that sentence at the time. I only knew it steadied something in my chest, the way a single clear voice can cut through a room full of people talking at once. Hauser heard it too. I watched something in his shoulders loosen, just slightly, just enough.

We pushed up off the beach by midmorning, through a gap the engineers had blown in the wire, and into the low country beyond, fields the Germans had flooded to slow us down. Sergeant Russo, who’d been a longshoreman in Baltimore before the war and treated the whole invasion like a logistics problem to be solved, kept us moving in short bursts, watching the hedgerows for movement.

“Eyes up, mouths shut,” he said, the same thing he’d said a hundred times in training, and the familiarity of it was its own small comfort.

It was somewhere past noon, in a drainage ditch half-full of brackish water, that I found myself next to Hauser again, both of us catching our breath while Russo scouted ahead. The fighting had moved away from us for the moment, a strange lull in a day that otherwise felt like one long held breath, and Hauser pulled something from inside his jacket. It was a cigarette lighter, brass, dented along one edge, the kind of thing you could find in any five-and-dime back home.

“My brother gave me this,” he said. “Before I shipped out. Said it’d bring me luck because it brought him luck in the last war.”

“Did it?”

“He lost three fingers at Belleau Wood.” Hauser turned the lighter over in his hand, not quite smiling. “So I don’t know what kind of luck we’re talking about.”

I laughed, the first time I’d laughed since we’d left England, and it came out strange and too loud in that quiet ditch, and Hauser laughed too, and for a moment the war receded into something almost bearable, two kids sitting in muddy water passing a cheap lighter back and forth like it was the only solid thing left in the world.

“You scared?” he asked me, not looking up.

“Every second,” I said, because there didn’t seem to be any use lying to him, not there, not that day. “You?”

“I keep thinking about the ditch,” he said. “Not this one. The one back home, behind my dad’s barn, where my brothers and I used to catch crawdads. I keep thinking if I just focus on that, on the smell of it, the mud, I won’t have to think about anything else.”

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes.” He pocketed the lighter. “Right up until it doesn’t.”

We didn’t talk much more after that. Russo signaled from up ahead and we moved again, through hedgerow country that I would come to hate more than the beach itself in the weeks that followed, because the beach had been open and at least you could see what was coming, while the hedgerows hid everything until it was already on top of you. By late afternoon we’d linked up with paratroopers who’d dropped in before dawn, men with the particular hollow-eyed look of soldiers who’d been fighting alone in the dark for hours, not knowing if anyone was coming for them at all. One of them, a corporal with a bandage wrapped crooked around his forearm, shook my hand like I’d personally rescued him, and maybe in some sense I had, simply by being there, by being proof that the invasion was real and not some isolated airborne disaster.

We dug in that night in a field that still smelled like the cows that had grazed it before the war turned it into a battlefield, and I lay on my back looking up at a sky gone fully dark for the first time in what felt like a very long year, and I thought about my mother, who didn’t yet know whether I was alive, and about how strange it was that the same moon hanging over this French field was hanging over our kitchen window in Ohio, indifferent to all of it.

Hauser was a few feet away, and I heard him before I saw him, a small metallic click, the lighter again, flicking it open and shut, open and shut, not lighting anything, just working the hinge.

“You should sleep,” I told him.

“I will.” Click. “In a minute.”

I didn’t sleep either, not really, not that first night, and somewhere in the dark I found myself praying, not in any organized way, not the prayers I’d learned in Sunday school, but something simpler, a kind of bargaining directed at nothing in particular. Let Hauser keep his fingers. Let the lighter keep working. Let tomorrow be smaller than today.

It wasn’t, of course. Tomorrow was never smaller than today, not in that summer, not in that country. But that first night, in that field that smelled of cows and gunpowder, with a boy three feet away clicking a dented brass lighter against the dark, I let myself believe for a few hours that it might be, and that belief, false as it turned out to be, was enough to get me through to morning.

We pushed inland over the following days, toward Cherbourg, through towns whose names I couldn’t have pronounced a month earlier and would never forget afterward. Hauser made it through that first week, and the next, narrating his way through hedgerow after hedgerow in that same low mutter, the lighter always somewhere on his person, the crawdad ditch always somewhere in his head. I don’t know what happened to him after Cherbourg, not really, not the way I know what happened to some of the others. The Army had a way of scattering men once the lines reorganized, transfers and replacements and units bleeding into other units, and somewhere in that churn Hauser and I were separated, and I never saw him again.

I think about that ditch sometimes, the one near his father’s barn, the smell of mud and crawdads that he reached for whenever the war got too large to hold in his head all at once. I never asked him for the details, the layout of the property, the names of his brothers, the color of the water. I wish I had. I think there’s something owed to the people who survive alongside us in the worst hours, some accounting we never quite get around to making, and Hauser is one of the debts I never paid.

What I remember most clearly, more clearly than the noise or the cold water or even the general’s calm voice cutting through the chaos, is the sound of that lighter. Click. Click. A boy working a hinge in the dark, not trying to make fire, just trying to make a small, manageable sound in a world that had stopped making sense. I think that’s what most of us were doing that whole summer, in our own ways. Finding some small mechanism we could control, some hinge we could work, while the larger machinery of the war ground on around us, indifferent to whether we understood any of it at all.

I still have a lighter like his. Not the same one, I never knew what happened to the original, but a similar model, brass, the kind you could find in any five-and-dime. I keep it in a drawer I rarely open. Some nights, when the house is quiet and my own grandchildren are asleep down the hall, I take it out and flick it open and shut, open and shut, and I think about a ditch full of brackish water, and a boy telling me about crawdads, and a war that started, as far as I was ever concerned, on a strip of sand that wasn’t even the one we’d been aiming for.

We’ll start the war from here, the general said. He had no idea how true that would turn out to be, not just for the campaign, but for every soldier who carried that morning home with him, however far inland the years eventually took us.

Feature Photo by Sandeep Singh