We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.

Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

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

I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

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

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about