Paris. August 26, 1944.

When Pfc. Chester Michael had gone over all the ways he that he might die in the war, when he thought about them back at the barracks weeks before Utah Beach ever happened, the top things on the list were: gettin shot, gettin blown up, and gettin fuckin shot. Weren't those the normal ways that soldiers were dying in this war? Yeah. So that's probably how he would die too. By getting shot at, and those shots not missing.

But like this?

Down here in these tunnels? With that smell—it was like this mucky kind of smell, reminded him a lot of the old Pond behind Jack's uncle's farmhouse. It was a kind of standing-water-type smell; how it smells once the water had got something it shouldn't have gotten into it and then that thing had absorbed that water and let it fester.