The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission.

For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults.

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow.

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.