- Joe tries to stop from sinking in and out of consciousness. The bandages are gone, so he knows that a lot of time must have passed.
- Joe feels like he's been sent back into the womb, and he doesn't know if he'll ever escape it.
- Joe thinks of all the simple things he'll never be able to do again. He's afraid of how helpless he will be.
- Joe thinks about how a lot of people have either amputated limbs or mutilated faces, but not that many people have all of the above. He thinks about the doctors who worked on him and wonders how they patched him up. He wonders why he didn't bleed to death, and he wonders whether his limbs were blown off in the blast or whether they were wounded and infected and amputated later. He also wonders why the doctors didn't just let him die at some point.
- Joe thinks about the stories he's heard about others wounded in the war, men who eat or urinate through tubes and will do so for the rest of their lives. He also thinks about those who are mentally wounded and recalls hearing about a soldier whose face was burnt by a flare: his wife, when she saw him, murdered him and their three children with an ax and was found in a saloon that night trying to eat her glass of beer.
- But no one is quite in the predicament that Joe is in. Joe thinks with irony how his survival is a medical triumph with ridiculous odds. He's the one-in-a-million loser.
- Joe begins to wonder about something sticking to the scab at the base of his throat and realizes that there is a cloth mask covering the hole that is his face. He tries to dislodge it but can't.
- Joe tries to rock back and forth to see if he can turn himself over, but he can't do that, either.
- Joe realizes that there is a hole in his left side that doesn't seem to heal; it leaks fluid. He imagines that the wound stinks, and he's glad that he can't smell it. We guess that's a silver lining.
- Joe starts to fade into a dream again. He feels a rat crawling on him and remembers when his regiment stormed a German trench that had been abandoned for a week. There, they found a dead Prussian officer with a rat chewing on his face. The men become enraged and beat the rat to a pulp.
- Joe feels the rat digging at the wound in his side and eating him like he's a Vegas buffet. He can't do anything about it. He imagines running through the hospital corridors and screaming at the nurse until he tires himself into unconsciousness.