cubes for a few moments, watching the patterns they made in the liquid. "Combat," he said softly, "has a nasty habit of putting you under the kind of stress that breaks people apart from the inside. Your whole world is shattering around you and you know that your decisions and your actions—right or wrong—will not only affect your own life, but those of others. Not just other soldiers, but civilians in harm's way, which is worse."
He fell silent again, for long moments. She waited him out. He didn't often let her see this part of his life and she wanted to understand him, wanted to understand what had made him the kind of person he was. She didn't want to interrupt or distract him, when he was finally speaking of it.
"When the stink and horror of it is all around you," he finally said, voice low and harsh, "when people are dying on all sides, when you want—need, in fact—to run gibbering for the deepest