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

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

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

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

I was a coward. I went to the war.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.