They grew breasts beyond compare. They grew breasts because they had to. Flat-chested, they weren’t considered manly enough. Grow some breasts, the administrative contingent would say. Grow some breasts and then maybe you can join us on the battlefield.

A very large gauntlet was thrown. Which precipitated breast-busting, molding, sculpting. The men underwent procedures. The men became breast-first men, chests puffed, chests inflated (some would say patriotically). They grew breasts and were saying, not in so many words—We are prepared to have cold steel bayonets plunged into our tender asking breasts, we are ready to have our chests punctured, to forfeit our lives for the sake of national debt, live theater, censored pride, grains of salt, whatever. Whatever.

The sloganeers coined slogans for the Breast Boys: Breast-Led Till Dead, or, God Breast America. The slogans worked. They seeped in like narcotic gnats. They boosted morale virally. Some of the men got lost fondling themselves. Others succumbed to the load-bearing weight of their redefined carriages. Yet the slogans kept sloganing, record-scratch echoes in hidden hallways. What you couldn’t do: wrap the dead bodies in slogans.

The bodies piled up, victims of bayonet plunges, chests deflated, perfectly engineered breasts gone to rot. Yet, despite the growing carnage and body count rise, men continued to grow breasty, with new slogans superseding the old ones—Put your breast foot forward, or, These nipples don’t run, on and on and on, slogans and jingles inspiring hordes of breast-endowed men, their manliness never a question yet always in question—busty, monumental, pillowy—these became catchword adjectives, and everywhere, everywhere the battlefields became premature burial grounds for scorched flowers and breast-led men laid to incalculable waste.