Daniel Osborne a journalist from the Daily News wants to interview Slim Weston who lost a leg in the war. Slim accuses the journalist of being guilty of the crime of wanting to tell about bravery and the actions of a soldier above the call of duty.

 It makes Slim mad as when the papers do that they glamorise something that has about as much right to glamor as the bubonic plague. Slim gives Osborne a real picture of the battlefield complete with the smell of death a place like what it is, a place for dying. Slim tells the tale of how he enlisted for the Korean War as a seventeen year old simply trying to impress the girls.

Once enlisted the first lesson was how to stay alive.