Censored

We’re set to deploy tomorrow, and for the first time, I’m scared. This is not the first time I have gone to war, but never have I left so tender a child in the arms of so beloved a mother. I know I will not die, but war is frightening enough in itself, leaving aside the specter of one’s personal death. Individual mortality is not the point. To be wounded, to be captured, to see men cut down all around you or languishing in the hospital, despairing of ever returning to normal life: I have seen it all before. Only the technology of death and salvation changes - the motives and outcomes have been the same since the dawn of time.

He put down his pen. While he wanted to tell her of his past failures, his real fears - Perkins in the Revolution, Sullivan in the Civil War, his own experience with shell shock in the Great War - it had been hard enough to get her to believe the truth at all, if she even r