Marty Mason is lying in bed in a seaside house staring at a dog, Murphey, which he is afraid of. He imagines feeling sand and remembers his time in the desert of Iraq, accompanying a platoon of marines as a journalist (the marines resented him for this) and set on writing a book that would "convey the strategies of the old men who made this war and the courage of the young men taking fire for them." He saw a driver killed at a checkpoint.

The book had begun well enough, with the main character as a stand in for himself. After Iraq, he sat in a Frankfurt bar telling his stories to an Israeli businessman who was actually an intelligence agent, named Rosenthal but named Spode as a character in his book, in a Frankfurt Bar.

Rosenthal remembers all the beer they drank, and all the water he drank with the platoon and realizes, in bed, he will have to get up to use the bathroom. He tells the dog, Murphy, that he wins.