I arrived in camp in the middle of 2017, resuming my National Service after some years abroad. I remember little of those first, scorched days, except that barely two months later one of us was killed in a training accident. It happened while his unit was on an exercise in Australia: they were maneuvering by night when his tank overturned, flinging him to the ground. We found out the next day. His unit occupied the barracks right across from ours, and finding his picture in the news, it was impossible to say if I had not seen him in the cookhouse just weeks before—warm, rowdy, and alive.