More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat, an army instructor once told me, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. If I ever die during an op, it won’t be because I was too lazy to properly prepare.
For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes you want so badly to forget.
“I just want to see her.” He nodded for a moment, then said, “I’m glad you said so. I could tell it was that from the way you just talked about her, and I would have been awfully concerned if you’d tried to bullshit me. I would have wondered if you were bullshitting yourself, too.” “I don’t know if I’m bullshitting myself or not.” “Partner, that in itself is a profound species of honesty.”
“To be unaccompanied by constant memories,” I said, quoting something a friend had once said to me, “is to find a state of grace.”
I pulled on a pair of shorts and did two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on.
He seemed to be absorbed in a book. As I got closer I noticed the title: Beyond Good and Evil. “You’re reading Nietzsche?” I asked, incredulous.
What was bothering me was that I was hoping she hadn’t been involved. I realized this was dangerous: it used to be I would just do the math and accept the results. I didn’t hope one way or the other or have any other particular feelings about it. Now I was emotionally invested in the outcome. That made me wonder whether I could trust myself not to skew the data.
“You know who’s the third-largest contributor of forces to the coalition there, after the U.S. and the Brits?” “Private contractors, son, no doubt about it. We’re the wave of the future. Ought to form a union.”
I thought of Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho, the Book of Five Rings, which I’ve read many times. In his recounting of his over sixty sword duels, and of the half-dozen large-scale battles in which he participated, Musashi had never expressed doubt about the morality of his actions. He seemed to take it as a given that men fought, killed, and died, and I doubted he gave much more thought to any of this than he did to the fact that men breathed and ate and fucked and slept. The one was as natural, and immutable, as the other. What mattered was one’s proficiency.
the sword’s morality is determined by the use to which it is put. There is katsujinken, the sword that gives life, or weapon of justice; and setsuninto, the sword that takes life, or weapon of oppression.
Delilah was holding the Kimber, but it was clear to me that Hilger had the advantage. His weapon was more at the ready, for one thing. He had the high ground, for another.
Said in your best Obie-Wan voice.
As Dox’s favorite philosopher said, when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
It’s quite a thing, quite a privilege, to care about someone so much that the measure of the worth of your own life is changed by it.”
