Vito Corleone’s favorite child was the last person at the party to say “Surprise!”

Vito was stoic about Michael’s news. He asked the questions any loving and concerned father would. It was clear that he did not approve, though he never said so.

In the days that followed, the U.S. government rounded up the Italian citizens within its borders and held them as prisoners of war (Enzo the baker, for example, would spend two years in a prison in New Jersey). In addition, more than four thousand American citizens with Italian names were arrested. Theresa Hagen’s parents were among them, though they were not charged and were quickly released. Hundreds of people with less sophisticated legal representation were detained much longer-months, years-even though they, too, were charged with no crimes.

Before Christmas, the government issued an edict that restricted the participation of Italian Americans in war-related industries. All over the country, hardworking, law-abiding American longshoremen, factory workers, and civilian clerk-typists were summarily fired.

By then, Michael was at Parris Island, crawling like a reptile across a parking lot covered with broken oyster shells.

Four percent of the American population came from Italy. They were destined to make up ten percent of the casualties.

Everything the government issued Michael Corleone was too big-his helmet, his uniform, even his boondockers. He barely noticed. He was proud to be a Marine, and he saw what he wanted to see. But the first time his mother saw the picture of her youngest son, hair shorn, dressed in ill-fitting dress whites that looked more like a costume than a uniform, she burst into tears and didn’t stop crying for three days. She then put the photo on the mantelpiece. Every time she passed it, the tears began anew. No one dared to move the picture, though.

Michael Corleone’s platoon at Parris Island had forty-seven men, all from the East, with a fairly even split between northerners and southerners. Michael had never been in the South before. He knew more about the rivalry between north and south in Italy than the one here, and was surprised by how similar those two rivalries turned out to be. Being from southern Italy and northern America, he could see both sides. And the arguments were over nothing. Music, for example. The southerners liked what the northerners called shit-kicker music. The northerners liked Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, classy numbers they could dance to. Though Michael had known Johnny Fontane all his life, he kept that to himself during the many arguments waged over his music. Any time some petty squabble made the men even for a moment forget about the real enemy, their DI made them regret it-by becoming the real enemy. They’d all arrived most afraid of being afraid, of failing to do their duty when the time came. An hour later, they were more afraid of Sergeant Bradshaw than anything. Michael was a quiet, able soldier, but he spent his days convinced that at any moment his DI might kill him. At night, Michael lay sweating in his bunk, thinking about what a brilliant system boot camp was.

Michael’s suspicion that the Corps’s height requirement had been instituted in part to keep Italians out of the elite forces was borne out when he found only one other person of Italian origin in his platoon. Tony Ferraro, also from New York, was a minor-league ballplayer-a catcher. He looked it: stocky, bald on top. Like Michael, he’d volunteered as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor, but what he really wanted was to go into Italy and send Mussolini to hell.

Tony and Michael were the two shortest men in the platoon. They were slow-footed and weak marksmen, but they’d arrived at PI in better physical condition than most of the other men-happily, since everything they’d ever heard about Marine boot camp was true. Men collapsed, vomited, vomited blood. Michael learned to love it. He felt sorry for the platoons whose DIs sent them back to their barracks after only four hours of marching in the knee-deep sand instead of the eight Sergeant Bradshaw made them do. When boot camp ended, he addressed the platoon-for the first time-as men.

Every Marine in the platoon loved him. Many shed unashamed tears.

Michael, who shed nothing in boot camp but a few harmless pounds, again marveled at the genius of what had been inflicted upon him.

A few months later, Tony Ferraro was securing an island so small it didn’t have a name or a military purpose either when a Japanese sniper shot him right in the heart.

Before dawn, the men grabbed their rifles, shouldered their seabags, and stood at attention beside a row of idling trucks. A corporal with a thick southern accent called out names and assignments. He butchered Corleone, which Michael had expected. He was shocked, though, about what the corporal said next.

Camp Elliott, M1 rifle, infantry. Michael Corleone was going to the Pacific.

His dream of helping to liberate Italy was shattered. But what was he going to do, write his congressman? It was probably his congressman (after no more than a nod from Michael’s father) who’d rigged this in the first place.

Michael let nothing show. A Marine goes where he’s sent.

A southerner already on the Camp Elliott truck extended his hand. “Welcome aboard, Dago boy!” he said, pulling Michael up.

That was the Marine name for San Diego: Dago. Michael knew how else the man meant it, but he didn’t rise to the bait. They were Marines first, Americans second. Whatever else they were came after that.

Michael had never seen the West before, either. He spent the better part of the trip at the troop-train window, mesmerized. It was a good way to see what he was fighting for. Nothing could have prepared him for the size, grandeur, and beauty of this country. The farther west he went, the more he fell in love with the craggy, improbable landscape.

They stopped for a desert training session about thirty miles from Las Vegas, where the first big casino had opened months earlier. That night, Michael killed a rabbit with his bare hands and ate its stringy meat in a cold arroyo, staring at the otherworldly glow from the town that visionary men like him were destined to transform into an industry that would still be there, thriving, long after the fall of the Axis powers, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union, after most of America’s factories and steel mills went broke or moved to Southeast Asia.

In San Diego, Michael went through another few weeks of lectures and training, hand-to-hand combat, swimming tests, all the finishing touches, but when it came time to ship out, his heart again sunk. He’d been assigned to guard detail. Indefinitely.

The first chance he got, he went to a pay phone and called Tom. The Hagens were having dinner. A baby screamed in the background.

“I’m going to ask you something, Tom. If you lie to me, I’ll know. Things will never be the same between us.”

“Any question that starts out like that,” Tom said, “is one a man shouldn’t ask.”

Michael was young and undeterred. There would come a time when he’d have understood that Tom had just answered the question Michael was about to ask: “Did Pop have anything to do with my assignment?”

“Your assignment to do what?” Tom said.

Michael lowered his voice. “I did not join the Corps to be a cop.”

“You’re a cop?” Hagen said.

Michael hung up on him. A few days later, Michael pulled shore patrol and stood on the docks with his rifle shouldered, watching as men he’d come to trust shipped out, the air thick with bragging about all the Japs they were about to kill. He never saw any of those men again.

The worst guard detail job was making civilians follow the blackout law. People think their circumstances are special, and it’s impossible to reason with them. The first few exasperating nights of this, Michael wanted to smash in their smooth, self-important faces with the butt of his rifle, but he soon came up with a better idea. His CO, who had an even lower opinion of civilians, thought it was brilliant. “I never thought I’d say this to an Italian fella,” the CO said, “but you may be officer material.”