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Being besieged is like any other variation of war. Behind the immediate terror of killing one another is tedious, spirit-destroying boredom.
Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live.
No need to push when time was on your side, Mulvaney mused. That was the problem. The NVA had forever. The Americans had until the next election.
Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.
War was breaking life apart and splintering it, so there were no second chances and all the first chances were wasted.
like an image in facing mirrors in a barbershop, deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, curving with time and distance away into the unknown, but always repeating, always the same. Mellas thought that if he could smash one of those mirrors, then this agony would stop and he’d be left alone to dream. But the mirrors were only thoughts, illusions.
“Between the emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, falls the shadow,”
“At least you’re over the hump on that one. It’s the people who don’t know it who are dangerous. There’s at least two hundred million of them back in the world. Boot camp doesn’t make us killers. It’s just a fucking finishing school.”
“None of them have ever met the mad monkey inside us,” Hawke added. “But we have.”
He knew that there could be no meaning to someone who was dead. Meaning came out of living. Meaning could come only from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered.
The things he’d wanted before—power, prestige—now seemed empty, and their pursuit endless. What he did and thought in the present would give him the answer, so he would not look for answers in the past or future. Painful events would always be painful. The dead are dead, forever.
He knew that all of them were shadows: the chanters, the dead, the living. All shadows, moving across this landscape of mountains and valleys, changing the pattern of things as they moved but leaving nothing changed when they left. Only the shadows themselves could change.
