a week long ski trip in the rocky mountains: special.
leaving your two kids under three years old at home: even more special.
the amazing hospitality of the vance family and completing a new book: priceless.

from the author: the only certainty that summer was moral confusion. it was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. you can’t fix your mistakes. once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.

and more: a true war story is never moral. it does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. if a story seems moral, do not believe it. if at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. there is no rectitude whatsoever. there is no virtue.as a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.