When you're scared, you're still hanging on to life. When you're ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you've never done it before.

At 19, your brain hasn't finished wiring itself. So the first time you have a good friend die, most people don't go through that at 19. Soldiers do. They're facing life in this accelerated, compressed form, and a lot of times, they're not ready for it.

Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?

An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words

I was surprised how open and unguarded the military was. I expected more scrutiny, more supervision from command.

I'm a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.

I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.