He did not remember falling.

Only the sound.

A thunderclap that tore the night open, followed by a pressure so immense it felt as if the world had folded inward and crushed him. For a moment—perhaps a second, perhaps a lifetime—there was nothing. No pain. No fear. Just white silence.

Then the pain arrived.

It came in layers, like fire poured slowly into his body. His ears rang so violently that the screams around him sounded distant, muffled, as if underwater. When he tried to move, something inside his chest screamed back in protest, sharp and final.

He was lying on his side, half-buried in churned mud and snow. The battlefield stretched endlessly around him, illuminated by flares that bloomed in the sky like dying stars. Shadows of men ran and fell. Tanks roared. Artillery thundered. The war did not pause for him.

“Get up,” he whispered to himself.

His name was Thomas Hale, Private First Class, United States Army. Twenty-two years old. Born in Iowa, where the land was flat and forgiving, where pain usually came with reason and warning.

This pain had neither.

He tried to push himself up. His left arm responded. His right did not. When he looked down, he saw why.

His right leg was wrong.

Not gone—but shattered, twisted beneath him at an angle that no living body should ever bend. Blood flowed freely from a tear in his trousers, dark and thick, disappearing into the mud. The sight of it did not shock him. It only exhausted him.

“Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God, please.”

The cold crept into him immediately, ruthless and intimate. It slid under his uniform, into his bones, into the open wound, biting harder than the pain itself. He knew, distantly, that cold was dangerous—that it could make him sleepy, that sleep could mean death—but the idea of rest felt merciful.

A shell exploded nearby.

The shockwave lifted his body and slammed him back down. White agony exploded through his spine. He screamed then—screamed until his throat burned and his voice broke, until the sound was swallowed by the chaos around him.

Someone ran past.

“Hale!” a voice shouted. “Hale!”

He tried to answer. Only a hoarse gasp escaped his lips.

Boots skidded in the mud. A face appeared above him—Sergeant Miller, his helmet smeared with blood that might not have been his own.

“Jesus Christ,” Miller muttered. “You’re hit bad.”

“Don’t leave me,” Hale said, though it came out as a broken whisper.

Miller grabbed his shoulders, dragging him a few inches toward a shallow crater. Every inch felt like being torn apart. Hale cried out, clutching at the dirt, leaving streaks of blood behind him like a trail.

“I’ll get you out,” Miller said. “I swear.”

Another explosion cut him off.

Shrapnel screamed through the air. Miller jerked violently, then collapsed beside him, eyes wide and empty, a jagged piece of metal buried in his neck.

Hale stared at him.

“Miller?” he said.

No response.

The war moved on.

Hours—or minutes—passed. Time lost meaning. Hale crawled because lying still felt worse. He dragged himself forward with his arms, ignoring the way his ruined leg scraped against rocks and frozen clumps of earth. Each movement sent lightning through his body. Each breath felt smaller than the last.

He thought of home.

Of his mother standing at the kitchen sink, hands red from the cold water, humming a song from the radio. Of his father, silent and solid, fixing fences, believing deeply in things he never said aloud. Of the girl he had kissed behind the church, the one who cried when he left, promising to wait.

“I’m sorry,” Hale whispered to no one. “I tried.”

The battlefield smelled of metal and smoke and something sweet and terrible that he knew was death. Bodies lay half-buried in the snow, faces frozen in expressions that ranged from surprise to relief. A hand stuck out of the ground nearby, fingers curled as if grasping for something just beyond reach.

Hale wondered if anyone would find him like that.

If someone would write a letter.

Your son fought bravely. He did not suffer.

The thought made him laugh weakly, a sound that turned into a cough, then a choking gasp. Blood filled his mouth—warm, coppery. He spat it into the dirt and kept crawling.

The pain was no longer sharp. It was everywhere. A vast, endless ache that swallowed everything else. His thoughts slowed. The flares in the sky blurred into streaks of light. The explosions became distant, like a storm far out at sea.

He began to beg.

Not for rescue.

For release.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please let me die.”

A memory surfaced then—unexpected and vivid.

A summer afternoon, years ago. He was lying in tall grass, watching clouds drift across a blue Iowa sky. His mother called him in for dinner. He had complained, rolling onto his stomach, unwilling to move.

You’ll have to get up eventually, she had said, laughing.

The memory broke him.

Tears froze on his cheeks as he dragged himself forward another meter. Just one more. Then another. He did not know why he kept going. Pride, perhaps. Or habit. Or the stubborn refusal to surrender completely, even when surrender felt like mercy.

Dawn crept in slowly, gray and indifferent.

The gunfire softened. The explosions grew less frequent. The battlefield revealed itself in the light—an open wound carved into the earth, littered with broken machines and broken men.

Hale lay still.

He could not crawl anymore. His arms trembled violently, refusing to obey. His breath came in shallow, painful bursts. Each inhale felt like knives in his chest. Each exhale carried a faint, whimpering sound.

Footsteps approached.

He did not look up.

“Hey,” a voice said softly. “Hey, soldier.”

Hands touched his shoulders—gentle, careful. Medics. He recognized the red crosses on their armbands through blurred vision.

“He’s alive,” one of them said, surprise in his voice.

Hale laughed weakly.

“Barely,” he whispered.

They cut away his uniform. The cold air bit into his exposed skin. One of them cursed quietly when he saw the leg.

“Easy,” the medic said. “We’ve got you.”

“No,” Hale murmured. “Don’t.”

The medic paused. “What?”

“Just… let me go,” Hale said. “Please.”

The man’s face tightened, but his hands did not stop moving. Morphine burned as it entered Hale’s arm, a spreading warmth that dulled the edges of the pain without erasing it completely.

“You’re not done yet,” the medic said. “Not today.”

Hale wanted to argue. He wanted to scream. But the drug pulled him downward, into a thick, heavy fog.

As they lifted him onto the stretcher, he caught one last glimpse of the battlefield—the bodies, the mud, the blood-stained snow. He wondered how many of them had begged for death the way he had. How many would never get the chance.

The stretcher jolted.

Darkness closed in.

He dreamed of crawling.

Always crawling.

Years later, when the war was over and the world tried to pretend it had been worth it, Thomas Hale sat alone in a small room, staring at a leg that was no longer there.

The pain never fully left him.

Sometimes, late at night, when the house was quiet and sleep refused to come, he could still feel the cold earth beneath his hands. He could still smell the smoke. Still hear the distant thunder of guns.

Still feel himself crawling, meter by meter, begging for an end that never came.

And in those moments, he understood the cruelest truth of all:

The war had not killed him on that battlefield.

It had simply followed him home.