Readers learn that a recent confrontation with death left the author sensitive both to idle talk and to serious talk about death, thus impacting his reading of Kant’s scholarly invitation to death. The potentially terminal experience of journeying to the valley of death, engaging in mortal combat, and battling the beast to a draw, admittedly influenced the author’s personal experiment in self-examination. Like Kant—and one presumes the aged Socrates—the author discovered that dignity, the integrity of his person, his honor, and inner worth are more valuable than life itself, such that in a time of barbarism, the author would choose death in lieu of survival behavior that would destroy his dignity, savage his honor, disgrace the integrity of his person, and abolish inner worth. Able to now confirm that he was arguing against himself while writing endless drafts of this text, critically questioning and appearing to disfavor Kant’s ethical position, the author argues paradoxically that members of the U.S. Department of Defense Advisory Committee had the better argument in their ethics of survival, insofar as their invitation to life did not portray traumatized captives like McCain, who finally broke under torture, as disgraceful, contemptible, blameworthy humans who should be vilified and ashamed forever. Rather, the demonstrably thoughtful members of the committee displayed both empathy and a commonsense realism in their code of ethics, reserving judgment of the base behavior of barbarized POWs as if they were guided by Nemesis, the enemy—as Camus said—of intemperance or immoderation. The study concludes with a Kafkaesque musing of Wittgenstein, who raised some doubt about whether we can be certain we are asleep or awake when we lose our way in our calculus, or lose our way when trying to solve the difficult equations of life.