United States Army

The United States Army is the institution that trains and deploys Ben Givens in the Second World War, first as an infantry rifleman in a mountain regiment and later in the Italian campaign. Its presence is both organizational and intimate: it assigns his unit, exposes him to combat and its aftermath, and provides the structure within which Rachel Lake serves as a military nurse. For Ben, the Army’s military purpose becomes inseparable from a conflict between killing and healing, and the war continues to shape his life long after his service in Italy.

Structure and Training

Ben arrives at Camp Hale, Colorado, during a snowstorm with six dollars in per diem money and presents himself to the sergeant on duty at the train station. He is assigned to L Company, Third Battalion, 86th Mountain Regiment. On his first morning, the new recruits face calisthenics shirtless in the cold, then march at 10,000 feet on the Continental Divide and over Tennessee Pass. The training quickly becomes a bodily ordeal: Ben grows numb and short of breath, suffers a nosebleed and fever, and is sent to the camp hospital with altitude sickness. The regiment’s training is presented not as an abstract preparation for war but as exposure to physical limits, enforced by the demands of the unit.

After the mountains, the troops are stationed at Camp Swift, Texas, where Ben and the other mountain soldiers languish in a flat, arid environment of dust, insects, and scorpions. When his orders arrive, the Third Battalion travels by train across the South and reaches Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, before continuing toward Europe. The Army’s hierarchy and logistics govern this movement from training camps to embarkation, while the landscapes and daily conditions change around the men.

Service, Nursing, and Moral Conflict

Ben’s service as a gunner puts him in direct tension with Rachel’s view of wartime duty. Rachel, who has trained in nursing, asks him to reconsider whether he could serve as a medic rather than participate in killing. Ben replies that the Army has made him a gunner and that he feels compelled to fight the war directly. Rachel completes her classes, is sworn into the Army Nurse Corps, volunteers for overseas service, and is accepted despite her inexperience. After an orientation at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, she travels to France aboard a transport ship. Their different roles place the work of healing and the work of combat side by side within the wartime system.

The conflict between those forms of service does not resolve simply when Ben reaches the front. He is sent into the Italian campaign with his regiment, but after the experience of combat he no longer pretends to fight as the unit advances across the Po plain. During the fighting to liberate Torbole, he crouches behind a wall and does not participate. His withdrawal is a marked change from his earlier insistence that he must fight directly; the Army’s continued advance and his assigned place in it do not restore his conviction.

Combat’s Aftermath and Return to Duty

After the surrender, Ben is sent to Bolzano, where men from his company commandeer weapons from a Beretta factory and guard a warehouse containing paintings looted from Florence’s galleries. The duties belong to the occupation that follows combat, but they do not erase what Ben has experienced. Earlier, after giving blood to save Bill Stackhouse, Ben sits dazed and is cared for by the battalion chaplain. He spends three days in the rear, wrapped in blankets, and is interviewed twice by the division psychiatrist to determine whether he is fit for service. The Army then returns him to the line with replacements. Ben avoids speaking to the new soldiers, preferring that they remain nameless because their departure would leave less of a wake.

The sequence shows the Army’s power to assess and reassign a soldier, while also revealing the limits of that institutional process: Ben is put back into service, but the narrative records his silence and estrangement rather than any recovery of purpose. His subsequent reluctance to fight and the psychic weight of his wartime memories make the end of organized combat different from the end of war’s effects.

The War’s Continuing Imprint

On the train to Livorno, Ben travels among soldiers who are loud with the prospect of going home. The journey passes through damaged towns, shattered farmhouses, and fields of battle. Ben, by contrast, has little to say. He writes to Rachel in Marseilles, and she comes to Livorno on leave from her nursing service. Their reunion occurs within the Army’s wartime movements, but it also gives their relationship a private space amid military transport and the remains of battle.

Years later, while intending to die in the sage country, Ben finds himself preparing to assist with surgery on Rex, a dog. He reflects that it has been nineteen months since his last surgery on a human heart, and is startled to be washing his hands and rolling up his sleeves as he had done thousands of times. In that moment his mind returns to the Army training and war he has tried to put away. The recollection links the Army’s history of combat to the medical identity he resumes: his wartime role had been that of a gunner, but the work of care remains active in him.