The narrator says that “[f]or a long time I was angry. I didn’t want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn’t tell anybody I’d been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I’d tell them lies” (53). He often tells a grotesque story about an arrogant officer grabbing a body bag away from two Marines who worked in Mortuary Affairs to prove that he wasn’t squeamish. In the story, the bag rips open, and the corpse’s organs splash all over the officer’s face, making him scream. But the narrator says that no one talks about human remains comically, and even if the story had been true, no one would have joked about it.

The narrator struggles during his time in the Marines: “I didn’t fit in at Mortuary Affairs, and nobody else would want to talk to me. I was from the unit that handled the dead. All of us had stains on our cammies. The smell of it gets into your skin” (55). He wonders if he would have handled his time in the war better if Rachel had not left him. She is a pacifist and had not been able to stay with him when he enlisted. He joined the Marines because he was “tired of doing the weaker thing” (56).