I want to enjoy it in peace as long as it lasts.

From A treasury of American anecdotes; sly, salty, shaggy stories of heroes and hellions, beguilers and buffoons, spellbinders and scapegoats, gagsters and gossips, from the grassroots and sidewalks of America by Benjamin Albert Botkin. 

A [Kentucky] mountaineer fighting overseas in the First World War kept getting nagging letters from his wife back home. He was too busy fighting to write letters, even to his wife. At last, stung to action by his wife’s scolding missives, he sat down and wrote her:

Dear Nancy: I been a-gittin yore naggin letters all along. Now I want to tell ye. I’m dam tired of them. For the first time in my life I’m a-fightin in a big war, and I want to enjoy it in peace as long as it lasts.

Yours, etc.