Cpl. Raymond Teller

Ray Teller is twenty-two years old and already a realist. He grew up poor in rural Alabama, came of age during a war, and arrived in Korea the way a lot of young men did — without much say in the matter. By the time the novel opens, he is a patient in the same evacuation ward as David Kahn, recovering from wounds that have taken him off the line and left him with time he didn’t ask for and a crutch he resents needing.

He is not an educated man in the formal sense. He did not have the kind of childhood that included much schooling. But Ray Teller is sharp in the way that practical intelligence sharpens a person — through observation, through reading people, through knowing when something is true even if he can’t explain why. He has a social barometer that rarely fails him. He knows when someone is lying, when someone is afraid, and when someone is telling the truth in a way that may sound crazy but isn’t.

That last instinct is what draws him to David.

He doesn’t understand David Kahn, not fully. But Ray understands something more important: that David is not performing. Whatever the man is carrying, it is real. And Ray Teller, who has spent most of his short life being underestimated by people who mistook plainness for simplicity, has an instinctive respect for anyone who is genuinely telling the truth.

Around David — who is surrounded by people trying to figure out what he is — Ray is the only one who simply accepts what he is and waits to see what happens next.

He also had, tucked somewhere in his childhood, an aunt who gave him books. It is not a detail he mentions often. But Ray Teller is a man who reads. That fact matters more than it seems to at first.