The World War arena is the game's most disorienting departure — Sam thrown into a battlefield that the beach has preserved, the traumatic memory of Clifford Unger's military service rendered as an environment Sam has to move through. The skeletal soldiers advancing in formation are the beach's record of that service, the specific texture of Clifford's war preserved in the space between, waiting for a repatriate to enter and trigger the replay.

The session establishes Clifford as something more than an antagonist. He is a father who lost a child and a soldier who lost his purpose and a man whose strand to Sam is older and stranger than either of them understood. The beach has been keeping his war alive for the same reason it keeps everything alive — because the dead do not release their attachments easily, because the living who meant something to them remain present in their memory, because the boundary is permeable in both directions.