A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

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

Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

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

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