FIRE AWAY
IN THE SUMMER OF 2011, Andrew Biggio, then a 23-year-old sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps, was near the end of his tour in Afghanistan when his platoon came across a group of Afghan police gathering the bodies and body parts of dead comrades—victims of a roadside bomb. As the men struggled to wrestle one corpse into a body bag on the back of a pickup truck, they lost their grip. The body hit the pavement, making, Biggio recalls, a “disturbing sound unlike any I had heard before.” He put the incident out of his mind—or so he thought. Two years later, back home in Winthrop, Massachusetts, he was in a crowded grocery store when a large melon fell from a woman’s shopping cart, making a noise just like that body in Afghanistan. The horrors of that day were suddenly before him. He abandoned his cart, bolted from the store, and headed home.
On the way, he passed a sign he’d passed many times before, “Andrew Biggio Square”—marking a place named after the man he himself was named for: a great-uncle he’d never met, killed in Italy at age 19 in 1944. This time, though, questions flooded his mind, and he felt compelled to learn more about his uncle, his war, and how he’d lost his life. He.
