You Travel Here And You Travel There,

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.

Courage Is A Muscle That Develops Through Use. It's No Use Waiting For Some Inner Fire To Conveniently Become Apparent At The Moment Of Crisis - That's Cartoon Stuff.

I Wanted To Look At The Differences Between How We Fought Then And How We Fight Now, Because The Current Lack Of Closure Generates A State Of Psychological Unease That Is Interesting To Acknowledge And Examine.

You May Think That's Funny Osama But You Never Can Squeeze Every Last Bit Of Pride Out Of A Human Being. It's Like A Tube Of Toothpaste. You Can Twist It And You Can Crush It But There's Always A Tiny Bit Left Isn't There?

We No Longer Need To Show People Being Brave: Instead, We Can Examine How They Became Brave. We Can Assume That They Didn't Start Out That Way. If We Allow That They Started Out Just Like Us, Then Their Journey Into Courage Becomes Both More Fascinating And More Impressive.