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

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,...

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

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

…much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)

The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.

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...

They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.

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...

Meteorologist see perfect in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.

Billy’s at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell.

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...