Why he writes

"Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and as rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.
I just loved her. 
...Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones--that kind of love.
Neither of us, I suppose, would've thought to use that word, love, but by the fact of not looking at each other, and not talking, we understood with a clarity beyond language that we were sharing something huge and permanent.
...And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life."


-- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried