In my eyes Marlantes has become the pre-eminent literary voice on war of our generation. He is a natural storyteller and a deeply profound thinker wh….

At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. ….

The cause doesn't have to be righteous and battle doesn't have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in ….

I don't think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don't think they should have been..

Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there's a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though ….

Ironically, though our society of affluence brings safety and stability, it doesn't bring psychological health. As wealth goes up, suicide and depres….

I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not at….

Often people who live through the trauma are nostalgic when it's over. When I went back to Bosnia 20 years after the brutal civil war, even people wh….

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144).

The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives ….

An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words.

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for i….

During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. Th….

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply perfo….

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 ….

One interesting thing I found was that if you take an affluent modern society and collapse it during a crisis, like a war or a natural disaster, peop….

Combat isn't where you might die -- though that does happen -- it's where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don't underestimate the pow….

Right now, America doesn't ask us to do anything besides pay taxes. We don't even have to vote. But as psychologists will tell you, when you have to ….

The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives s….

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in..

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad ….