And all of the guys who died, all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world a safe place for democracy, to make the world safe for words without meaning, how did they feel about it just before they died? How did they feel as they watched their blood pump out into the mud? How did they feel when the gas hit their lungs and began eating them all away? How did they feel as they lay crazed in hospitals and looked death straight in the face and saw him come to take them? If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for, then it was also important enough to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away, you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You’re goddamn right they didn’t. They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for, the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother, a father, a wife, a child. They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born, please, god, just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important. They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was “I want to live, I want to live, I want to live.”