No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.

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

I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they've always gotten killed doing it. And they've always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived.

I don't think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn't offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we'd steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life.

I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.

War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)

I hope I get married one day.