It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.

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

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

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.

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.