I was drafted into the Army when I was 19 and came out at age 22. Most people that I knew didn’t think they’d come home alive. I didn’t think I would either, so I was happy when I did.

Koch is recalling his World War II service in a plain, unsentimental way that underscores how pervasive fatalism was among young draftees. The emphasis is not on heroics but on probability: many expected not to return, and he counted himself among them. The closing line—“so I was happy when I did”—frames survival as a kind of accidental grace rather than an earned triumph. Read in light of Koch’s later public life, the remark also hints at a formative experience that can sharpen gratitude, urgency, and a pragmatic worldview: if life can end abruptly, then returning home becomes the first, defining good fortune on which everything else is built.