George Tilson is an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Iowa. Enlisted in the Army during World War II and arriving in Normandy just after D-day, he is nicknamed Heck for his reluctance to swear. From summers of farm labor Heck is already strong. He knows how to accept orders and how to work uncomplainingly. But in combat Heck witnesses a kind of brutality unlike anything he could have imagined. Fear consumes his every thought and Heck soon realizes a terrible thing about himself: He is a coward. Possessed of this dark knowledge, Heck is then faced with an impossible task. "A short, furious novel. . . . Articles of War presents a tough and visceral vision of war as 'a universe unto itself' and a moral crucible." – The New York Times " Articles of War stands out as a surprising achievement for our times, a story that pulses with a heart-tugging revelation." – The Bloomsbury Review "Short, spare, and beautiful, guided by a precision and a sweeping imaginative intelligence that reminds one intensely of Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage ." – O, The Oprah Magazine "Extraordinary. . . . Articles of War explores the emotional turmoil of war, with the spin of an adolescent forced to reckon with the role he plays in an act of brutality and violence." – Rocky Mountain News Capturing the reality of war with a fidelity and power that echoes the best of classic war writing, this haunting novel brings to life the terrors of a young soldier in shocking, almost hallucinatory detail. George Tilson is an eighteen-year-old Iowan farm boy who enlists in the army during World War II and is sent to Normandy shortly after D-Day. Nicknamed "Heck" because of his reluctance to curse, he is a typical soldier, willing to do his duty without fuss or much musing about grand goals. The night before he is trucked into the combat zone, Heck meets a young French refugee and her family, an encounter that unsettles him greatly. It is during his first, horrific exposure to combat that Heck discovers a dark truth about himself: He is a coward. Shamed by his fears and tortured by the never-ending physical dangers around him, he struggles to survive, to live up to the ideal of the American fighting man, and to make sense of his feelings for the young French woman. As the stark reality of combat--the knowledge that he could cease to exist at any moment--presses in on him, Heck makes a series of choices that would be rational in every human situation "except war. With remorseless, hypnotic clarity, Arvin draws readers into the unimaginable fear, violence, and chaos of the war zone. Arvin layers profound meaning within a brilliantly executed minimalist style. His portrayal of the emotional and physical terrors Heck can neither understand nor escape is one of the most disturbing and unforgettable accounts of the life of a soldier ever written. Nick Arvin studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and Stanford and has worked in a variety of positions in automotive and forensic engineering. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of the Michener Fellowship, he is the author of In the Electric Eden , a collection of short stories. He lives in Denver, Colorado. 1. The boy they called Heck arrived at Omaha Beach in August 1944. Soon he would be sent to the front, but for now he waited for his papers to be processed at the Third Replacement Depot. He felt lonely, nervous, bored. Men were everywhere here, unloading supplies, bringing in artillery and armor, moving off for the front, coming back bandaged or in boxes, or, like Heck, waiting. The scene had a hivelike quality, vehicles and men streaming through this portal into and out of the interior of France. Amid all the activity, with everything in transition, it was easy to feel alone. Men were sent forward every day; every day new men arrived. While he awaited orders Heck had few demands on his time. He wandered the crowded, churned sand of the beach, watched the ships slowly come and go, watched the formations of Allied planes pass overhead, their multitudinous drone burrowing into his bones, their glinting wings and bodies like the crosses of cemeteries. Around him Heck saw men who had lost as much as a hand or an eye who smiled at the prospect of going home. He saw the drivers of the army's ubiquitous two-and-a-half ton trucks poring over their maps with the intensity of generals preparing for battle, and a GI told him that when getting off one of these deuce-and-a-half trucks an infantryman could calculate precisely how much danger he was in by watching how fast the driver turned around and got out of there. The landscape along and just beyond the beach had been reduced to a shambles of destruction—many locals had been living for a couple of months in tents set up inside houses without walls or ceilings while others patched their war-wounded homes with scavenged wood and bits of cloth. They stood sullenly in lines waiting for the soldiers to distribute f