A true war story is never moral.

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

Let the story tell itself.

It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

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