Where I lived in Glasgow looked like Dresden after the war. It was a bomb site. I don't think I'd ever played football on grass until I moved to Australia.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place, and in the sky, The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard among the guns below.
'Haqeeqat' was a good war drama.
The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.
I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.
In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
When I was six, the Korean War broke out, and all the classrooms were destroyed by war. We studied under the trees or in whatever buildings were left.
In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.
There is a lot of my childhood in 'The Sandcastle Girls.'
