You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach.
Nothing turns inside.
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe. This one does it for me. We crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, my friend Curt Lemon stepped on a boobytrapped artillery round.