I can't find it right to talk much about the war. Anecdotes now an again are fine, but the real stuff… I can't do it. People who haven’t experienced war just don’t understand. They ask: "Well, were you scared?" And I always respond with a noncommittal. Because, fact is, I don’t rightly know that I have an answer for that particular question. There really is no time for a such a silly sentiment as fear. Yet I cannot remember ever being without it. A body wants to live, you know.

I only know that war is mayhem. Chaos. But the most organized chaos imaginable. That surely doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it's truth if you can figure it. There were sights I'll never forget and can never tell. Death is a hard thing to bear. There was so much death. We really hadn’t much of a chance. We were few. But what we lacked in number and firepower, we made up for in spirit. We fought like mad people. We were invincible. That is, until we were crushed.

After the war it never seemed that life could ever go on. There was never a normal, you know. But avoiding Feds turned out to be not so hard as we thought, and we get along fine enough.