It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

What happened, and what might have happened?

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.