Always Sami. I was tethered to her somehow. To that scared little girl I’d found on the staircase nearly a year earlier; to the past, when teaching was simpler and I could care about everyday...

In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target.

You can’t live your life in a bubble, Charlie. And you can’t live Evan’s life for him. He won’t thank you if you try to wrap him in bubble wrap and set him on a...

He said: ‘You don’t understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what...

I write to get ideas out of my head

The only lies that are true are the ones that you believe.

You cannot run faster than a bullet

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears.

The military is very constitutionalist, and I have my faith in them and in the cooler heads of the people.

Maxim 5: Close air support and friendly fire should be easier to tell apart.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Military men are the scourges of the world.

Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he was going out with a rifle in his hand.

This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which...

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they’ve been given.

When you get right down to it, militaries are essentially legalized mafias.

There are more good people than bad people, and overall there’s more that’s good in the world than there is that’s bad. We just need to hear about it, we just need to see it.

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

We ask the military to be in a position that, if we ask them to do a task, they are absolutely able to do it for us.

Churches were never meant to be mental hospitals. They were supposed to be military outposts under orders to storm the gates of hell. Every believer is on active duty and called to serve a higher...

There is strong. There is Army Strong. And then there is Army Wife Strong.

Federal Officer: “The arms piled on the ground were not worth 10 cents a ton.

Mistakes, after all, are endemic to foreign and military policy given the unpredictability of events and the difficulty of securing reliable information in a place like Iraq.

If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

Borderline Personality Disorders” or mentally unbalanced. I attended many of these women, after they were discharged, or were wives of abusers, from xxx Air Force Base, when I was a psychotherapist working in the private...

Africa must remain on the path of democracy. But democracy MUST also remain about the PEOPLE, not about power

War is hell and waiting is hell and war is waiting.

No, young man. What you see is hell with the lid taken off.” — Mother Jones

Sir, what can be said of these things? Is it the arm of the flesh that hath done these things? Is it the wisdom and counsel, or strength of man? It is the Lord only....

I will never quit. My nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down i will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce...

The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn’t who they are;...

Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan....

It’s hard to describe being an expatriate of sorts to people who’ve never lived overseas, but when you’re an American living in a geographically separated region within a country like Korea, you form bonds with...

Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

As long as a population can be induced to believe in a supernatural hereafter, it can be oppressed and controlled. People will put up with all sorts of tyranny, poverty, and painful treatment if they’re...

Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.

Extravagant sartorial display had a purpose. It created the impression of wealth and power on the opponent and pride in the wearer which has been lost sight of in our nervously egalitarian times.

All they expect from you is your best effort. These Marines think that they are special. They are very well trained, very close knit, and they don’t like outsiders. If you want their respect, you...

The Los Angeles parade would begin in Griffith Park, where a large crowd would assemble and the speeches would be given. Every politician of consequence would be there. There was no way they would miss...

I think that, in the end, the military behavior and intelligence services are not very different from each other. It’s an attitude of hunters; they’re observing the prey.

Lead me, follow me, or get the hell out of my way.

Maxim 3: An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody.-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

Over-communicating is the glue that holds a high-performing team together and keeps them focused in the same direction. And, it circles back to clarity. Without good, consistent communication, you don’t have clarity.

Turns out I’m not so easily broken.

Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a...

A soldier is a killer painted hero.

In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade…....

Okay, Charlie, you can do this, all you have to do is convince a career military man that your son shouldn’t join the Army. That shouldn’t be too hard, right?

An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.