Philip Caputo quotes:

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant places.

In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front.

War, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

War - the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man's moral senses.

It's paradoxical that the death of your quarry is besides the point and at the same time the whole point. A chase without a kill as its object is like a journey without a destination; a kill without a chase employing all the hunter's craft is killing, not hunting.

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

You're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.