He couldn't hear a thing. The shells and mines and gunshots exploding all around in the smokey gray air were deafening. His sight was growing foggy, his ears were ringing, and it was getting more difficult to breathe with each second.

Soon, it would be morning in Oakland, California. The air would be golden yellow, and the trees would shimmer and stretch, leaves fluttering in the soft fingers of a breeze.

His hands and face were caked with gritty sand and blood in the creases of his palms and under his nails. One hand was clutched uselessly around his rifle, and the other twitched and scrabbled against the wound in his chest from which grew a small red fountain when his heart beat.

He was dying.

When the sun rose in Oakland, Elise would wake with Pete. She would talk to him happily as they sat outside the house she shared with friends. None of them had a child, but Jessie was expecting. And all five women had husbands or boyfriends all the way across the sea, serving proudly and sending letters when possible, telling of how boring it was sometimes, and the things the men did to pass the time. Elise told Pete, who wasn't old enough to understand, about his father, who was bravely fighting the communists a continent and an ocean away.

She wished he would come home to meet his baby soon.

He imagined how Elise would look now, holding a baby boy who was faceless in his mind. She would smile toothily at him, her long brown hair curling over her shoulders.

There was no sound, and the water washed inside his government-issue boots and socks, soaking the bottoms of his dark pants and staining his ankles scarlet.

Andrews turned his head to and saw only fuzzy outlines of men on the beach falling and falling and falling. So he looked up again, and everything was gray-white and red and coldly damp. And in his mind's eye everything was warm-yellow and soft and comforting.

Later that morning, Elise sang to Pete, out of tune and melancholy, of men who were too far away, and wives who waited and hoped for letters. Her voice blossomed, a rose in the warm air, only to wilt and be washed away with the tide, bleeding into the weeping red water.

And Private Andrews choked out rose petals onto his chin and the sand, and the green sunlight in his eyes faded and was gone into the sea.