Carmen’s expression glittered briefly at the hint of medals. Dave was disappointed to see it, but then he turned away from Carmen because he was afraid the same perverse, unworthy, unwanted flicker might have crossed his own face too.
“No task ever given to anybody in this battalion is as important as the task I’m giving you two men.” The colonel glanced at Kennebec and paused like an orator slowing down for the shorthand reporters. “You know you’re going out there to find Company C. Just where I don’t know, you don’t know, Loo-tenant Kennebec doesn’t know. All I can do is get you started. How and where you finish is going to depend on your own guts, your own brains, your own endurance, your own sense of duty to the hundred and seventy men here with the battalion and the hundred and sixty
