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.

[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.

. . . show the other side, the one that gets people out of bed the next morning, makes them scratch and scrape and fight for their lives because someone is telling them that they're going to be okay.

Americans worship technology. It's an inherent trait in the national zeitgeist.

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

Survival is the key word to remember—not victory, not conquest, just survival.

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