Sublime

10 He learned the importance of training and discipline, and how to deploy airpower and massed armor, particularly when confronting Germany’s superior panzer formations.

What struck me particularly about him was the mixture of a sort of innate natural ferocity with a similarly innate nobility—a mixture such as I have never come across in any other person.

A liberal pussy journalist is trying to get the touchy-feely side of war and he asks a Marine sniper, “What is it like to kill a man? What do you feel when you pull the trigger?” The Marine looks at him and says one word: “Recoil.”

Heraclitus, a philosopher born in the Persian Empire back in the fifth century BC, had it right when he wrote about men on the battlefield. “Out of every one hundred men,” he wrote, “ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a wa

Decorations for valor,

Malcolm Cowley assisted me in three important ways: His New Yorker profile of Perkins, “Unshaken Friend,” published in 1944, was the most comprehensive account of Perkins’s life to date.

Conner told his protégé: “In all military history, only one thing never changes—human nature. Terrain may change, weather may change, weapons may change … but never human nature.”