Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.