Aidan

Aidan, Ben Givens’s brother, appears in the narrative through two sharply different traces: a remembered camping trip in the sage hills and the news that he died at Peleliu. His brief presence gives a personal shape to the wartime grief that Ben still carries decades later.

Identity and Shared Memory

Aidan is named as Ben’s companion from long ago, when they camped in the sage hills. Much later, while alone in the desert, Ben prepares chukar over a fire with slow care, recalling how he had cooked in the same way on that earlier trip with Aidan. The repeated act makes the memory concrete: Aidan is present not through dialogue or description, but in a familiar practice Ben carries forward.

Death and Its Aftermath

After returning home from Italy, Ben learned that Aidan had died at Peleliu during the war. The account gives no further description of Aidan’s life or of their relationship beyond their brotherhood and shared camping memory. It places the news of his death within the history of Ben’s own prolonged wartime distress: fifty-three years later, in an October morning in a Quincy motel, Ben still feels the war within him and remains troubled by it.

Narrative Significance

Aidan’s remembrance connects an ordinary act of cooking to an absence that has endured across decades. The old fire is both a scene of companionship recalled and a measure of what Ben has lost; the narrative’s return to that shared camping practice quietly holds together family memory and the lasting consequences of war.