Young and scared – and young and dead – are both things that should not be.

I mean, I get that war is war, and it takes a certain physical aptitude to do it well…

But I wish death were an old man’s game.

Old men are stubborn enough to relish a last stand.

Young men have too many unrealized possibilities.

And the sailors get drunk. They all seem to be twenty years old on Hotel Street, too, twenty and nineteen and eight-teen and drunk because they are no longer in Des Moines and not yet in Danang.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem