Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.

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.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

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.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

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.