Sicily is one of the wartime settings through which the book establishes Cliff Booth’s military past and the reputation that follows him into civilian life. He remembers fighting there as a prolonged campaign of killing, and later uses that history to explain both his status as a decorated veteran and his capacity for violence.

Wartime Service

During World War II, Cliff Booth served in Sicily before being transferred to the Philippines to fight alongside Filipino guerrillas against the occupying Japanese military. He believed death was likely while he was in Sicily; after the transfer, he became certain he would never return home. His later capture and escape from a makeshift prisoner-of-war camp in the Filipino jungle belong to the continuation of that wartime trajectory, not to his service in Sicily itself.

A Place Recalled Through Violence

Years later, in a Cleveland pizza parlor, Cliff invokes his time in Sicily while confronting Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto. He says that on the day he received his Medal of Valor he killed at least seven men, perhaps as many as nine, and adds that he killed Italians every day while stationed in Sicily. He stresses that he remained there a long time. The recollection is not presented as a detailed account of a particular battle; Sicily emerges instead through the scale and duration of the violence Cliff claims as part of his past.

Reputation and Afterlife

Cliff’s wartime record earns him admiration within Hollywood’s stunt community, where he is regarded as one of World War II’s great war heroes. In the pizza parlor, he makes that status part of a direct threat: his medals and service become a claimed license to carry a pistol, before he kills the two gangsters. Sicily thus recurs not as a fully described landscape but as the remembered source of a reputation Cliff can wield. The book sets that public image beside the stunt community’s suspicion that he also killed his wife, showing how the authority attached to his wartime heroism coexists with knowledge of violence that the law has not established.