On the day I met the girl, I had finally had enough and gotten the nerve to act: AD, accidental discharge, right through one of my rebellious hooves. I would be sent home to Madison to live with my parents, a footless invalid listening to Cubs games on the radio and telling my nephews an ever-improving story of how I lost my foot （I stepped on a land mine, saving my platoon-mates）。
That day we were to march to a newly liberated village to interview survivors （“Cand-ee, Amer-ee-can! Dolcie, per favore!”）， to ask the peasants to rat out their Communist grandsons, to inquire as to whether the routed Germans might have happened to mention, as they ran away, oh, say, where Hitler was hiding. As we marched toward this little hill town, we passed, just off the road, the rotting body of a German soldier draped over some kind of rough, half-finished sawhorse made of gnarled tree limbs.
This is mostly what we saw of Germans that spring, corpses previously taken out by hardened soldiers or even harder partisans, whose work we superstitiously respected. Not that we were simply tourists ourselves; we’d seen a bit of action. Yes, dear dull nephews, your uncle had issue upon which to fire his .30 caliber in the enemy’s direction, little puffs of dirt exploding at the end of my every shot. It’s difficult to know how many clods of dirt I hit, but suffice it to say I was deadly to the stuff, dirt’s worst enemy. Oh, and we took a bit of fire, too. Earlier that spring we lost two men when German 88-mm cannons hailed the road to Seravezza and three more in a horrific nine-second firefight outside Strettoia. But these were exceptions, frightened bursts of adrenaline-blinding fear. Certainly, I saw valor and heard other soldiers testify to it, but in my war combat was something we tended to come across after the fact, grim puzzles like this one, left as brutal tests of illogic. （Was the German building a sawhorse when his throat was cut? Or was it part of his death, sentenced to have his throat slit across a half-finished sawhorse? Or was it symbolic or cultural, like a knight slung over his horse, or merely coincidental, a sawhorse happening to be where the German fell?） We debated such questions when we encountered these meat puzzles: Who took the head of the partisan sentry? Why was the dead infant buried upside down in a grain bin? Based on smell and insect activity, this German meat puzzle on the sawhorse was two days past decent burial, and we hoped that if we ignored him we wouldn’t be ordered by our CO, the gap-toothed idiot Leftenent Bean, to deal with the ripening body.
We were safely past the body and burial detail when I suddenly stopped marching and sent word forward that I would deal with the stewing corpse. I had my reasons, of course. Someone had taken the dead German’s boots already, and he’d surely been picked clean of insignia and weaponry and anything else that might make a decent trophy to show to the nephews at Thanksgiving in Rockport （“This is the Hitler battle spoon I took from a murderous Hun I killed using my poor bare feet”）， but for some reason this particular dead man still had his socks. And so crazed was I with discomfort that this dead man’s socks looked to me like salvation: two clean, tight-woven sheaths that appeared to cover his feet like bedsheets at a four-star hotel. After dozens of pairs of Allied replacement socks courtesy of my empathetic supply sergeant, I had thought I might try my luck with Axis footwear.
“That’s sick,” Richards said when I told him I was going back for the corpse’s socks.
“I’m sick!” I admitted. But before I could move for the dead man’s feet, that moron silver bar, Leftenent Bean, came astride and said that a mine-rigged body had been encountered by another platoon, and so our most recent orders were to eschew burial detail. I had to walk away from what appeared to be the warmest, driest, cleanest pair of socks in Europe, to march another two miles in these soggy, spiky beasts in full pupa stage. And that was it. I was done. I said to Richards, “I’m doing it tonight. SIW. I’m blowing off my foot tonight.”
Richards had been listening to me gripe for days, and he thought I was all talk, that I could no more shoot myself in the foot than I could levitate. “Don’t be stupid,” Richards said. “War’s over.”
That was what was so perfect, I told him. Who would suspect it now? Earlier in my war, a foot-shot might not have been enough to send me home, but now, with the thing winding down, I liked my odds. “I’m going to do it.”
Richards indulged me. “Fine. Do it. I hope you bleed to death in the stockade.”
“Death would be better than this pain.”
“Then forget your foot, shoot yourself in the head.”