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

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

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

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

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.

The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

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.