The narrator frequently brings attention to one image: the blue eyes of his friend Jorgeson. There is nothing remarkable about Jorgeson's appearance other than his “very clear cobalt-blue eyes”: “They were so remarkable that they caused you to notice Jorgeson in a crowd. There was unusual beauty in these eyes, and there was an extraordinary power in them.” While Jorgeson is firing at the enemy, he turns and looks at the narrator “with those blue eyes,” and just as Jorgeson is about to die, the narrator sees in his eyes “a final flash of glorious azure before they faded into the unfocused and glazed gray of death.” Later, the narrator is reminded of Jorgeson's eyes by the color of his Marine uniform, not because they were the same but because each color was so startling.

Jorgeson's eyes suggest some courageous quality he possessed that enabled him...