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

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

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

I mean, if you're proud of what you've done when you've served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what happened, we call that complaining. And so what are you going to do?

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

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.

He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.