Mr. Berenstain died November 2005.

It was decided that engineering officers weren't needed after all, and the Army Specialized Training Program was disbanded. They sent the lot of us to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where I was reclassified as a trained artilleryman and sent to join the Artillery Regiment of the 106th Lionhead Division, stationed at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.

I had been in the Army long enough to know it would have been futile folly to claim that some sort of mistake had been made.

Lack of artillery training wasn't my only problem. I had over time acquired a condition that can best be described here as the opposite of dysentery. I had no way of knowing it, but I had torn something in the interminable loops and kinks of my innards and was bleeding internally.

I was plugged into a gun crew on my first day and went on field maneuvers on the second day. The crew that mans a 105 howitzer consists of five men and a crew chief. All I would have to do as third man was receive the shell from number four and pass it along to number two, who would shove it into the open breech. Number one would then close and lock the breech and pull the lanyard, whereupon there would be a deafening BLAM and the shell would arc about twenty miles downrange and blow up an abandoned farmhouse.  But that's not what happened.

When number four passed me the shell, I dropped it point-down on the metal trail of the gun. It was a frozen moment. My crewmates were horrified. The crew chief grabbed me by the collar and called me many names, none of which was "butterfingers." The company sergeant rescued me from the crew chief.

 "Captain wants to see you," he said as he hus­tled me up the hill behind the firing line, where Captain Raines was waiting.

"Bernstein?" said the captain."Yessir," I said. I was beginning to feel woozy. The captain, the company headquarters tent, and the woods behind it began to swim.

"Well," he exploded, "what the hell have you got to say for yourself? You could have killed your whole goddamn crew!"

"Well, sir, the shell was heavier than I expected and it just slipped through my fingers."

"Heavier than you expected?" he roared. "Heavier than you expected? Dammit, soldier, your whole purpose in this outfit is handling 105 shells. So don't go telling me—"

"Begging your pardon, sir, but until today I've never even seen a 105 shell, much less held one."

"Don't try to shit me, Bernstein! I saw your damn papers and I know you had basic at Bragg—and artillery is all they've got at Bragg!

"I did my best to tell him the strange story of the one-eyed battalion and the circuitous glitch-ridden train of events that had got­ten me mistakenly shipped into his company. But I was getting weaker and woozier by the minute and made a mumbling hash of it. He sensed something was wrong. He slipped his hand under my helmet.

"Boy," he said, "you're burning up with fever. Somebody get this man down to the medical tent! On the double!"

Somebody must have. I vaguely remember being unloaded from an ambulance and gurneyed along the endless corridors of a hospital. It was days—two? three?—before I emerged from the nether world of surgery. Though I had wisps and patches of dreamlike memories of murmuring nurses and doctors, the glare of OR lights, the rubbery smell of anesthesia, and being asked to count back­ward from ten, my first reasonably clear memory was of my first visitor. It was Captain Raines.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"Okay, sir, I guess. But I'm not exactly sure where I am or how I got here."

"You're on the asshole ward of Wakeman General Army Hospital. After you dropped that round, you passed out on me. We handed you over to the medics, and they brought you here." He had a barracks bag with him. "I brought your clothes. The doctor says you were bleeding like a stuck pig when they brought you in. They had to do emergency surgery. You had a tear in your rectal wall. He says you'll be in here for at least a couple weeks. That's why I brought your stuff. I can't tell you dates—you know, loose lips sink ships. But I can tell you you're already detached to the hospital."

I thanked him for bringing my clothes.  "That's okay. I checked up on that story of yours. Found out it was true. Anyway, good luck, Bernstein."

"You too, sir." I watched as he walked down the ward, fit and trim right down to his polished combat boots.

The 106 shipped out less than a week after my visit from Captain Raines. Months later it was all over the newspapers and the radio that the 106 was the green division that German general Von Rundstedt targeted in the counterattack that was Hitler's last-gasp effort to wrest a negotiated peace from the Allies. It came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. By all reports, the 106 was decimated.

Indiana was the most bitterly cold place I'd ever been. It was flat as a pancake, and the wind blew down across the Indiana plains uninterrupted from the North Pole. Or so it seemed to Warren Reynolds, Walter Waraksa, and me as we walked from our stations on Colonel Blocker's plastic-surgery service across the utility yard to the mess hall.

Wakeman General Army Hospital was all around us.  We tried to hold our breath as we passed the utility plant. Its great brick smokestack was pouring smoke up against the low-hanging sky. Unable to escape, it descended on the yard like a gray shroud. The smell of coal gas was suffocating.

Warren and Walter were commiserating with me. They had each been promoted from T-5 (two stripes with a T) to technical sergeant (three stripes above, two below), whereas I was still a lowly T-5. Many things seem strange in retrospect. But for me, my most inexplicable recollection is how I could possibly have been preoccupied with getting another stripe or two, surrounded as I was with the worst horrors of war: the desperately wounded men who were pouring onto Colonel Blocker's plastic-surgery service.

Colonel Blocker had seen me sketching when he toured the Army Hospital's maxillofacial plastic-ward with Captain Menza, my surgeon. I was doing a portrait sketch of the Mad Russian, an enormous fellow who was a professional wrestler in civilian life. He was really from the Kentucky hills. He had sat in some mustard gas on maneuvers and was in the hospital for a skin graft.

 "That's pretty good, son," said the colonel.

"Thank you, sir."

"Are you a queasy type of fellow?"

"Beg your pardon, sir?"

"Can you stand the sight of blood?"

"I don't know, sir. I've never seen any except my own."

"Well, we're going to find out, because I'm founding a maxillofacial center here at Wakeman and you're going to be my medical artist."

Colonel Blocker promoted me from private to T-5 and set me up in a medical art studio on the sun-porch of one of his wards.

I scrubbed for, observed, and diagrammed as many as eight plastic procedures a day. These included skin grafts, bone grafts, and reconstruction of jaws, eye sockets, noses, and ears. I made step charts of innovative plastic procedures. I made and painted before ­and-after moulages (face masks) of representative cases.

I painted "glass" eyes, which weren't glass but acrylic, and made and painted prosthetic ears and noses, which were made of soft acrylic.

On August 6, 1945, Warren, Walter, and I were walking past detachment headquarters when Top Sergeant Marbury appeared in the doorway looking as if he had big news."Hey, you guys!" he yelled. "We just dropped some kind of superbomb on Japan and the war's gonna be over in about twenty minutes!"On September 2, 1945, the Japanese surrendered to the Allied joint command on the battleship Missouri.

The mustering-out schedule was based on a system of points awarded for overseas service, decorations and awards, and marital status. Since I had none of the above, I remained in the Army for a number of months. Walter, being married, was the first of our threesome to be discharged. He headed for Shamokin, Pennsylvania, determined not to go back into the mines. Warren was discharged a few weeks later. His old job as a mid-level insurance executive was waiting for him in Newark, New Jersey.