Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Twenty-first century war adds new risks: more and more often there are no front lines, no central command, no rules of engagement - only a chaotic collision of politics, power, faith and bloodlust. Victims are as likely to be civilians as soldiers.

A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.

We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.

In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man's moral senses.

So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.