The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy—anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding—and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.
War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. (pg. 144)
Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
…much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
The problem is that it’s hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.
Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it.
An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain,” one of the survivors wrote. “The equality of all men”.
How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?
If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.
The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.