The narrator is woken by a phone call from Kevin Boylan, his old captain in the Marines. Boylan says he is coming to New York to “get blacked the fuck out” (237). He just got back from Afghanistan. The narrator tells Boylan that he got a job with a law firm, and Boylan is proud of him, saying that he made the right choice when he got out. The narrator thinks about how easy his experience had been: “My Iraq was a stack of papers. Excel Spreadsheets. A window full of sandbags behind a cheap desk” (238).

After they hang up, he reads a document on his computer, a citation about Sergeant Julian Deme. He wrote it and tears up a little while reading its opening description of Deme’s bravery. He says that Deme is why Boylan is calling but that someone named James Vockler is why he answered the phone when Boylan called.

The narrator is an adjutant on his second deployment. Boylan is a lieutenant who asks him for help writing a citation for Deme after he is shot and killed while trying to pull Marines out of an ambush. Boylan writes a terrible citation for him, and the narrator offers to help.