I'm afraid Malcolm may be right in shouting at me to waken up. I'm not sure, though, he need shake me quite so roughly. Being mainly insomniacs, we elderly buggers tend to drop off at embarassing moments- but we're never that deeply asleep. He seems to be offering the quaint old Marxist view of things which would see me & my kind as the dupes of capitalism. You'd think I'd presented war as some kind of ideal state - though I tried to make clear my horror of it. I suggested merely there might be times when its avoidance at all costs brought worse things - & that the experience of it was inimitable. He asks me if I ever worked with homeless veterans. No. I have known & worked with a fair number of the chaps in the cardboard boxes, though. In this part of the world, they are the victims of wonky genes or being poor or the old demon ethyl alcohol or simply unpleasant mums & dads. I've also known a large number of veterans, both in civilian life & during my own time in `the military'. What was striking about them was not their shattered CNSs - which is, after all, my trade. It was the success almost all of them had made of their lives. Many still had bad dreams. But, at the same time, they were nearly all recognisable by the mature, humorous, self-confident way they confronted things. As one remarked: `You don't start worrying about anything very much until they start using live ammunition.' They all looked back on their time of war as the crucially formative period of their life. And they had all, in their time, enjoyed their share of those other `intense experiences' you mention - fucking women, listening to the St Matthew Passion.... I don't know if Europeans are more macho, less enlightened in their attitudes than Americans. But here's one American thought expressed at the end of what remains the nastiest war ever fought by Americans. `We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt - we still feel - the passion of life to its top. In our youths our hearts were touched with fire...' That wasn't Tarzan. (Note spelling, Malcolm.) It was Oliver Wendell Holmes. Scottie B.