Ben’s wartime trauma

Ben Givens’s wartime trauma is a persistent conflict between survival, violence, and responsibility. It first takes shape in the bodily extremity of mountain training, becomes most acute when he hesitates and then kills a German soldier in Italy, and returns years later as an involuntary memory. His attempts to care for the wounded and his later conversations with Rachel Lake give the trauma a moral dimension: he is troubled not only by what happened, but by the choices he believes he should have made.

Identity and the Return of Memory

The war does not remain safely in the past for Ben. Years after serving, he smokes marijuana in a motel room and finds his thoughts growing confused and relentless. As he lies in bed, the knowledge of his own approaching death becomes newly vivid and frightening; his limbs tremble, and he feels suspended between waking and sleep. In that unsettled state, his wartime memories return despite his effort to put them aside. The scene presents trauma not as a voluntary act of recollection, but as an experience that breaks into the present when Ben is physically and mentally exposed.

The memory’s timing connects the war to Ben’s awareness of mortality without making the two experiences identical. His present fear concerns his own death; the returning memories concern the danger, violence, and moral choices of military service. Their convergence makes the past feel newly immediate. The narration gives the return a bodily form—trembling and a limbo-like state—before Ben can organize it into a clear account. Remembering is therefore both a mental recurrence and an embodied disturbance.

Training and the Temptation to Surrender

Ben’s military past begins at Camp Hale, where he arrives by train during a snowstorm with six dollars in per diem money and reports to the sergeant on duty in the early hours of the morning. Assigned to L Company in the Third Battalion of the 86th Mountain Regiment, he spends his first night sleepless, fully dressed beneath blankets, thinking of Rachel Lake. The detail places private attachment beside the abrupt demands of military life: he enters a new institution, but his thoughts remain with someone outside it.

The first morning establishes the severity of the training. In late-fall weather, the recruits perform exercises on a snow-covered parade ground and then march for three hours at 10,000 feet, crossing Tennessee Pass as the weather worsens. Several men falter and are left behind. Later, during a winter exercise, Ben’s unit is ambushed in a simulated attack and taken prisoner. The men face wet clothes that freeze when the temperature falls, little food or drink beyond snow, and a difficult march through a mountain pass under guard. The exercise places endurance under sustained pressure rather than presenting hardship as a single test.

On an exposed slope, Ben recognizes that he could stop moving and let the cold take him. For a moment, surrender appears to offer an escape from the suffering of the preceding days. He does not follow that impulse: he turns away from it and struggles onward with a renewed resolve. The episode gives his trauma a formative contrast. The same life-and-death pressure that later makes him hesitate in combat first confronts him as a choice between giving up and continuing to act. His survival is not represented as effortless courage; it follows an acknowledged attraction to surrender.

Combat, Hesitation, and Consequence

In Italy, the pressure takes a different form. During an encounter in the woods, Kelly Lastenpole is shot and dies. Ben remains under cover with Bill Stackhouse as German soldiers pass through the area. When another German appears and a sudden confrontation develops, Stackhouse tries to ready his rifle and urgently tells Ben to shoot. Ben feels unable to act while the German brings up a pistol and fires. Ben then fires his Browning automatic rifle (BAR), killing him.

The episode does not reduce Ben’s action to a simple account of either heroism or cruelty. The threat to Stackhouse is immediate, but Ben’s delay is also central to how the scene unfolds: he is frozen at the moment when another man is demanding action, and then he acts with lethal force. The sequence leaves him with a memory of both paralysis and killing. Its moral burden is intensified by what follows, because the moment does not end with the shot; Stackhouse has been wounded and needs help.

Ben turns from combat to care. He opens his first-aid kit, tries to treat Stackhouse, gives him a sulfa pill, and applies a compress and gauze to the wound. He repeatedly apologizes and calls for a medic, then goes into the open to call again. The need for help persists while shelling continues. His efforts cannot make the danger disappear, but they show how his response to the violence also includes urgent responsibility for the injured man. Care does not cancel the killing or erase his hesitation; both remain parts of the same experience.

Telling the Past to Rachel Lake

After the fighting, Ben tells Rachel Lake about the German he killed, dwelling on the man’s eyes and death. He says that he did not think. Rachel responds that acting in such a situation is difficult, while Ben insists that the outcome did not have to be that way. Their exchange makes clear that his distress is bound to a judgment about his own agency: he does not describe the event only as something that happened to him, but as a decision he continues to examine.

Rachel later hears about the field surgeon who saved Bill Stackhouse’s life. Ben tells her that she was right and that he should have become a medic and listened to her. This recognition draws together the threatened lives of his wartime service, his attempts to help Stackhouse, and Rachel’s earlier warnings. It does not undo the combat or establish that Ben has resolved his guilt. Instead, his words identify a professional role he now believes would have better expressed his responsibility to others.

Significance

The narrative builds Ben’s trauma through recurrence and contrast rather than through a single explanation. A training exercise teaches him what it means to approach death and continue; combat later confronts him with an urgent demand to act, followed by the lasting fact that he killed a man. In the aftermath, he tries to save Stackhouse, and years later he recounts the events to Rachel. These episodes keep survival, violence, and care in the same moral frame.

The form of the recollection matters: the war returns during a vulnerable present-tense night, before Ben can choose to narrate it, while his later conversations give the experience words but no easy resolution. His regret about not becoming a medic expresses a wish to have served through preservation rather than killing. Yet the evidence also preserves the difficulty of that wish: in the woods, a comrade was in danger, Ben hesitated, and then he fired. The trauma lies in the persistence of that conflict, not in a simple lesson that one action could have made the past clean.