Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

In times of war, starvation, hunger and injustice, such tragedy can only be put aside if you allow yourself to be uplifted through music, film and dance.

As a child, I didn't know what they mean by 'to die.' So I grew up in a place where people used to die all the time, but a child is not allowed to see a dead body. When you ask, 'Where is so-and so?' you're told, 'He's gone to another world where we all go to live in the future.'

The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.

I just took everything so seriously in my early twenties. But now I'm like, 'life can be fun.' You don't have to overthink everything. I've found a way to be more at peace with things. I'm looking forward to turning 30.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he's regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.

As soon as I read that, it clicked: that's my theater of war. It was exciting to think that I could write about World War Two from a totally new place.