They didn't break me. I broke myself.

I wanted to serve. It was Desert Storm. I thought, 'I was a rich kid, and America's been good to me.

Remember; no matter how desperate the situation seems, time spent thinking clearly is never time wasted.

Gu was a worrier, a neurotic curmudgeon. If he had a headache, it was a brain tumor; if it looked like rain, this year's harvest was ruined. This was his way of controlling the situation, his lifelong strategy for always coming out ahead. Now, when reality looked more dire than any of his fatalisitic predictions, he had no choice but to turn tail and charge in the opposite direction.

The bottom line is I'm a slow zombie guy - I'm always a slow zombie guy but I also know I'm in the minority.

When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was "Hunt for Red October" by Tom Clancy...

Looking back, I still can't believe how unprofessional the news media was. So much spin, so few hard facts. All those digestible sound bites from an army of 'experts' all contradicting one another, all trying to seem more 'shocking' and 'in-depth' than the last one. It was all so confusing, nobody seemed to know what to do.