10 quotes
No point in denying who and what we are.
Living With Honor (2012)
People die, and sometimes there's not a damn thing you can do about it. But that doesn't make it any easier to accept.
Living With Honor (2012)
I'd be lying if I said that I adjusted quickly and easily to a life without combat. I don't think that's possible.
Living With Honor (2012)
All these freedoms and pleasures we enjoy as Americans were bestowed upon us, but they came at a great cost.
Living With Honor (2012)
When you hold a buddy in your arms and watch his skin turn gray, when you can feel his life slipping away, it's almost impossible not to walk around afterward in something of a stupor, asking yourself repeatedly: How did this happen? Why wasn't it me? But you have to let it go.
Living With Honor (2012)
Every day in the Korengal Valley held the possibility of death. The sun came up every morning and the shooting started shortly thereafter. That's just the way it was. The fact that you might have to kill someone, or that you might be killed, did not burn through your head, because that was life in the valley.
Living With Honor (2012)
For my wife, Jennifer, and our daughter, Lillian.
Living With Honor (2012)
That was the primary conundrum when fighting in the Korengal Valley: distinguishing between the real enemy and the imagined enemy; between fighters and people who were aiding and abetting. It made a difficult war nearly impossible, and an ugly war almost indescribably brutal.
Living With Honor (2012)
Every person has a first name, a middle name, and a last name. That person has a history. He has a family. He has a mother and a father, maybe a wife and a child. He has friends. Each time an American soldier dies, there is a long and powerful aftershock, rippling across continents, felt intimately by someone- maybe by many people- half a world away.
Living With Honor (2012)
Soldiers on the ground do not have the luxury of political opinion- it's irrelevant to their existence and their mission. They do what they are told, regardless of how crazy it sometimes seems. Soldiers do not make big decisions; they do not have choices, other than those those that are made in the blink of an eye and have life-and-death consequences. And they accept this responsibility willingly. They seek it out. They fight so that others don't have to fight.
Living With Honor (2012)