Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant 'paying off of old scores'; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.

Those who fought know a secret about themselves, and it is not very nice.

To get home you had to end the war. To end the war was the reason you fought it. The only reason.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.