Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito.

We want to give customers an inside view of our implementation so they could have a framework so they could go and do the same thing. If we can shorten the learning curve for our customers and for internal developers, that's success.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.