How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

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

Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. ... Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

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

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.

Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.

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