Henry lost his two front teeth one winter day in a divided town next to a gray river. They were fine teeth. Once, they were buck teeth and the kids he went to school with laughed at him and called him beaver and asked him how the trees tasted. But his parents spent a lot of money on bright metal braces to push the teeth back into his head and they were strong and even by the time he enlisted. Henry liked his front teeth. He used them to eat sandwiches and candy bars and pizza.

Henry was vaguely aware of a thing called history—it was something taught at high school—but he couldn’t begin to fathom the centuries of feuds and politics and geography that split these two groups of people. Serbian and Albanian. Neither Henry nor his friends could tell the difference. “Hey, Ric,” Henry said to the interpreter. “How can you tell the difference between Albanian and Serbian? What are you, anyway?”

“I am Albanian,” Ric said. Ric wasn’t Ric’s name. His name was some Balkan mess of A’s and K’s and Z’s no American could hope to pronounce. “And the Serbian nose, it is big, ugly. And they talk nonsense. This is how we tell the difference.”

“The nose, huh?” Henry said. It seemed flimsy, but he didn’t waste much time thinking about it. He was told: go here, stand here, watch here and he went and stood and watched. He watched as people drained out of buildings and flooded the road with a seething river of rage. He stood behind a machine gun and two leaking sandbags and hoped the American flag sewn to his uniform would protect him.

When the rocks started flying, Henry understood that he understood nothing.

Back at camp, he smiled his hockey smile through swollen lips and his fellow soldiers slapped him on the back and his commander shook his hand. And Henry hoped for many medals.