The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly.

If hardship brought out the worst in people, the human race wouldn't have survived. Right after 9/11, for instance, the murder rate actually went down in New York City. In World War II during the Blitz, the civilians of London were bombed almost every night for six months, but psychiatric admissions declined.

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

I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.

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.

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

There is some evidence that average wave heights are slowly rising, and that freak waves of eighty or ninety feet are becoming more common. Wave heights off the coast of England have risen an average of 25 percent over the past couple of decades, which converts to a twenty-foot increase in the highest waves over the next half century. One cause may be the tightening of environmental laws, which has reduced the amount of oil flushed into the oceans by oil tankers.