The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

I would never want to pass a law limiting freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean we have to condone statements that undermine basic national unity and respect. Imagine being asked to defend a country where some citizens say the man in the White House isn't their president. Or a major presidential contender accuses the commander in chief of not even being a U.S. citizen. Those kinds of statements erode trust in our democracy, and it's up to both parties to publicly reject them. We have to restore confidence that we are a nation that loves and believes in itself.

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

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.

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

Ironically, though our society of affluence brings safety and stability, it doesn't bring psychological health. As wealth goes up, suicide and depression rates tend to go up. I read one study that compared women in North America with women in Nigeria, and the group with the highest rates of depression was urban North American women, which is the wealthiest. Now, there are obviously huge stresses that come with poverty, but the poorer the society, the more collaborative people have to be.

The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors