I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

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 survived, but it's not a happy ending.

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.

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

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

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.