Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.

People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, how is she going to be able to get the country behind her when she seems like a political figure from another era?

We've just been sort of spinning our wheels for such a long time, for decades really, with each new president being considered illegitimate by the other side. That's been the case ever since Bill Clinton. And it's a - you can't keep frittering away your political capital that way and expect there not to be some long-term rot that sets in.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .