.....The man stood before me unaffected by my plea, I had to ask, "what do you sacrifice?" He thought for a moment, he stepped forward reassuringly or threateningly I couldn't tell. "Calm" That's what he said first, letting the words sink in, "Kindness, kinship. Love." His face fell and I could sense that my plea about my family was one that he himself had made before.

"I’ve given up all chance at inner peace. I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion, I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost and by the time I looked down there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. And the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror or an audience or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!” His final word struck me, they were haunting, they cut into me as I saw a man broken, held together by belief. He had already died, what was left was a ghost so committed that he could not pass on. He called me a Hero, he needed me to be the hero he could no longer be.

What can a man do when confronted by such a thing? With every celebration of our victory his voice echoes in my mind, the sacrifice of thousands, hundreds of thousands who will not be named, who will not be known, who fought and died, who suffered, who live with scars.....