Imagination is a killer.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

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.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.