I'm still alive, which is pretty cool.

I feel like I'm very lucky to be alive right now.

It’s remarkable, being alive.

It seems to me that I may be living too long. Indeed: my nearest relations have all died, and so have some of my best friends, and even some of my best pupils. However, I do not have a reason to complain. I am grateful and happy to be alive, and still be able to continue with my work, if only just. My work seems to me more important than ever.

I stayed alive therefore I am.

I am still alive then. That may come in useful.

Well, aren't we all grateful to be alive? I just know lots of people … at my age, I've lost a lot of people in my life and I'm very grateful to be here. That's what I mean.

I still live.

I still live.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

This place, it reminds me how lucky I am — just to be alive, to be walking out of here.

I am still here, although I don’t know why; accidentally, I guess, as I was born; I am as much or as little accomplice to my staying alive as I was to my birth.

Frankly, I don't believe in luck. Everything happens for some purpose. To begin with, I'm alive. I shouldn't be; I should have been dead many times over. No, I can't walk too well, I'm missing one lung, and I lock up like an old rusty gate if I sit too long, but I am alive. Most of my buddies aren't; almost all of them are gone. Over fifty-eight thousand other guys that I didn't know died with them, but I'm alive, and I'm here, and I owe them the telling of this story. Every one of them had his own story. Maybe he just stepped off a plane one day and got it from a misplaced mortar round. Maybe he was walking back from the latrine when a sniper got him. Maybe he's a bigger "hero" than I'm supposed to be, but few are alive to tell the tale. Every one of those guys sacrificed his life, or his limbs, or his humanity, or his youth, or his mind, and I'm alive to tell about it. Up until now, nobody has really cared too much about hearing our side of it, our stories. Maybe it's different now. But I can't tell everybody's story. I can only tell mine. This is not a story about war. It's a story about freedom and its cost.

I am happy to be here. It’s been a little bit crazy, but I like it,