This is the world, he thought. And I am in it.
It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.
He concluded that governments were like wars: the reasons and the forces might change, but it was still the same dying over the same soil.
He wore his medals. He had a surprising number of them, the real kind, not the ones you got for turning up. Although turning up was no mean thing, some days.
He wondered if he should try to talk to the boy like that. Perhaps the boy wondered why he didn't. But they had silence, and not many people had that.
Don't fuck around thinking you could have done it better. There is no better. There's just not being dead.
