Pencil drawings of Currahee and Doc Roe.

No penicillin; almost no morphine. When all he’s got left is himself, what else is there to heal with?

Brad has had a date written on a scrap of paper in his wallet for over a year and it's a date that he intends to keep. A journey myth of sorts – Brad sets out across America, pausing at various points across the way. What he can never really know is this: that he is not the first man who came home from the war to make this kind of journey. His path criss-crosses with those of three other men; Joe Liebgott who doesn't know where he's going, Tunny Clarke who doesn't really know who he is and Robert Leckie, who's struggling with what he needs to leave behind. It's a much a story about America as anything – a story about distance and how you live with it...a story about what it's like to come home and find a country that big waiting to be crossed. And nothing ever really changes.

Lovely Leibgott/Webster sketch.

Pencils+Photoshop

Joe says he's fast cuz he spent so much time running from bullies when he was a kid. Tip has no idea if Joe really means it or not. Lieb's a Jew even though his dog tags have a "C" stamped on the back. When Tip asks why he's got a C for Catholic, Joe just glares.

We look like boy soldiers, is what Dick Winters says.

The photograph is a little over-exposed. It looks all sky, with perhaps the suggestion of huts in the near background, seeming to hover in the air, fuzzy and pre-fabricated. He and Dick stand against the pyramid of Currahee, which rises smoke-like in the far background, like a fading monument. It already seems like something out of a legend in which he had no part. The burn of muscle and the taste of sweat and its sting in his eyes are not even a memory, but like a story he heard once. His own legs never felt a pain like that.

I disapprove of nicknames, but in this particular story, I will use them. For the sake of brevity, not familiarity, and certainly not out of any misguided feelings of affection.

* * * A FINAL STATEMENT: * * *
In the spirit of honesty, I feel I must tell you the last sentence of the previous paragraph is a lie.