"I was now twenty-one years, and I had been a fighter on and off for four years. Those four years should have been spent in school, or in falling in love and starting a family, or in working at a job, or in a hundred other ways. But that was not to be. For four years I had been in the middle of war, and I had different hopes and expectations now. I only wanted not to die in too much pain, and to foil the Germans as much as I could before I went."