What happened there in the mid-90s was that I... I saw the family. In the beginning, all I saw was the war, and that's why I... I hit a barrier and couldn't go any further. But when I saw the family, then I had a story to tell, which is how this family was ravaged, destroyed by the war – not because they had a boy fighting in the war, but because they had this daughter. Now, what interested me about the daughter, right off, was that I was writing about what was... what had really gone on. A strange thing happened in the Vietnam era, and that is for the first time in American history, with perhaps one exception, there were a body of young women, anywhere from 17 to 23 or 24, who were in the forefront of a political movement, a violent political movement. Now, in the Suffragettes, in the Suffrage Movement there were plenty of young women there, but it wasn't violent. And there were half a dozen names that I read in the paper, young women I read about, who were arrested, in jail, and some of them wrote autobiographies. I read those books, and I was interested in this phenomenon. Where did this come from? What was driving the violence in these young women? In the young men, what was driving the violence – among other things – was that they themselves stood to be drafted. But these young women didn't stand to be drafted. Their rage was kind of pure, you know, purified of any personal motive. I don't say that to celebrate them. I just say that to describe them.

So that's how I got the idea for the girl and not for a boy, for a... for a son. There were plenty of sons who were in that movement as well.