Yank Martin's testimony promises a clear account ("This is the way it happened that night"), but what follows keeps slipping out of focus. The speaker seems to be in some tense situation, maybe a military one, since there's a radio, orders, a company, and talk of an atomic storm. Yet the details keep turning odd and domestic: a bag of lunch, three beans, a comb, red wigs flying off his skull. Sense and nonsense sit side by side.
The speaker feels caught between readiness and helplessness. He is "stock still," gripped by "a familiar fear," and pushed out into "silver space" by urgency, only to realize he has no idea what to do. Time stretches out, unused. The mood is dreamlike, anxious, and a little darkly comic, like a witness whose memory is real but won't arrange itself into a story. The short last line, "My rooms stood," lands as a strange, quiet fragment of survival or stalemate.