A buddy of mine was writing to the president, and he talked me into writing. It was just a letter of support from us. It took me five minutes, then I went on patrol and forgot about it.

I did a terrible job of writing.

He actually signed off on that letter.

At that point, the only way we knew we were going to go home was to go to war.

I stumbled upon a treasure chest. Imagine that Thoreau, in the middle of writing 'Walden Pond,' just disappeared. Then somebody stumbled upon the notes.

We have a tendency when we're faced with great tension to get some relief by writing about it in a way that's less than serious. The effect was that people were plainly suffering and maybe to release some nervous energy he exchanged some emails about how he looked on TV and how his clothes were. It made him look like he was insincere, like he couldn't deal with serious issues, and that all he was interested in was how he looked. It also made him look like he was wasting time when there was no time to waste.