In the summer of 1944, a farm boy from Clemmons, North Carolina traded tobacco rows for a rifle and sailed past the Statue of Liberty aboard the Queen Elizabeth. With the 2nd Infantry Division he came ashore at Omaha Beach and fought across France — up Hill 192 above Saint-Lô, west through the hedgerows to the siege of Brest, then east by boxcar to the frozen pillboxes of the Schnee Eifel. On 17 December 1944, as the Battle of the Bulge erupted around Monschau, shrapnel from an 88 found him at a crossroads his outfit had named Heartbreak. Patched up under fire and healed in an English hospital, Harold Curtis Jarvis crossed the ocean home to his wife — the long way around, and against the odds.