The settings were almost always ones where alcohol was present and where declining would have been conspicuous.

He was a young man under enormous and unfamiliar pressure, far from home, separated from the community and the landscape that had shaped him, being asked to be something he wasn’t — and alcohol was available and it helped, for a while, in the way it helps.

By the time the tour ended, the pattern was established.

It would prove very hard to break.

What He Carried Back From Iwo Jima That No One Could Photograph