Excerpt: A Woman's War (provisional)

The hardest part was not the danger, it wasn't even the training, which was grueling, and even the torture, which in my case was mercifully brief. The hardest part was the inaction, the waiting. It killed many who could not stand it, who would rather put themselves and their compatriots in terrible and unnecessary peril rather than sit still and wait for their turn to help the cause again. In the stillness we feel our grief for the friends and family we have lost, we feel in our own bones the terrible cost of the the war paid in lives, in treasure, in opportunity lost, in foreign friends lost to us. In the quiet we feel we have too much time to think of the scale of the loss, that so many people, the world, have experienced. The loss of loved ones and home and beloved places, of opportunities to do what we were meant to do.