Fear became an ocean in which he was drowning. He did not know how to swim, barely knew how to stay afloat, and there was no land in sight. Fear. The greatest fear of his life before this had been his father's whippings. in comparison they were nothing. He longed for them now. Anything but this. He could shut it out, forget it for moments, sometimes for minutes, but darkness, gunfire, screams, blood, mud, snow, the frantic urgency to become one with his rifle again and again always brought the fear back: he could not escape. The fear was there. it was real. it was monstrous, trying to devour him, and it would not go away. He wanted to run and then realized he was as afraid of running as he was of this huge thing that was pain and death and something more that he dared not even look at. Time stopped, or so changed that it was no longer time. His life became a series of very tiny, discrete moments. one step, then another, and another. Living became a matter of getting through only the present tiny moment and nothing before this moment or after it existed. The past and the future were a hot stove and he had had his fingers burned over and over before he learned that they were a hot stove. The past and the future hurt, they were a cruel, unrelenting mockery of his present reality. Walking down the trench, he stumbled. He looked down. His foot had hit a hand lying in the mud, As he was stepping over it, he noticed someone was leaning against the wall of the trench. The soldier was staring at the severed hand. One of his sleeves was empty and bloody.

One moment at a time. Soon even that became not enough to keep him afloat in the ocean of fear because there were days and weeks when each of those moments was a complete nightmare. There was no surcease. Even when the guns stopped his ears still heard them. The borders of the little moment-by-moment nightmares melted Imperceptibly and became one endless nightmare. There was him. There was the ocean. The ocean would have him.

The solution came at night. He was squatting in one of the shelters half-asleep, half-awake. He jumped to his feet, his eyes wide at what he had seen within him. The essential part of himself was a small, very hard diamond, glowing brightly deep inside. He had seen it clearly, could still see it and he knew nothing could ever really touch him, so hard, so fiercely brilliant was the diamond which was himself. He was safe. No matter what happened to him or around him he was safe. invulnerable. Untouchable.