I do not think the long-range bullets I fire provide the mark of a man; I am only dimly aware that they are dehumanizing me. They are my opium TTO see me through my time here. But with each hit they give, they only provide a feeling respite from the past I cannot escape from and the present I have chosen to mire myself in. And, grounded as I am in the reality of this hill, I do not yet fully appreciate how this addiction is infecting my future with malediction. With this clinical, psychopathically detached behavior considered as normal, proper and expected on this hall, I cannot yet stop to think - because I cannot allow myself to here - of how here respites may be blackening my soul in all the time I will have left on my own back Home - should I even live through the remainder of my months here, in some other corner of this Hell of a country.

Among You: The Extraordinary True Story of a Soldier Broken By War