Without Remorse (John Clark, #1; Jack Ryan Universe, #1)

by Tom Clancy

Loneliness didn’t tell you what you had lost, only that something was missing.

The past happened because a hundred little random things had to fall exactly into place in exactly the right way, in exactly the proper sequence, and while it was easy to accept the good results, one could only rage at the bad ones.

He remembered something from his Catholic prep school, a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid that had defined his mission almost two thousand years before: Una salus victus nullam sperare salutem. The one hope of the doomed is not to hope for safety.

Song Tay was the whole story of Vietnam, told in the few minutes it had taken for a superbly-trained team to fail, betrayed as much by process as by some misguided or traitorous person hidden in the federal bureaucracy.

Like carrying a heavy load, however strong a man might be, his strength was finite and gravity was not. Strength of body was easily understood, but in the pride and righteousness that came from his faith, he had failed to consider that the physical acted upon the psychological, just as surely as gravity but far more insidiously. He interpreted the crushing mental fatigue as a weakness assignable to something not supposed to break, and he faulted himself for nothing more than being human.

and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The usual pushers doing the usual business.” The implied criticism of the situation that everyone had to acknowledge as normal went unanswered. It was a Monday morning, after all, and that was bad enough for anyone.

One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against. Warrior and healer, parallel wars, similarity of purpose, but so different in their actions. Diseases of the body, and diseases of humanity itself.

They ignored the traffickers as best they could, and in their petty righteousness they ignored the street bums like Kelly, but he could not find it in himself to dislike them for that. In such an environment they, like he, had to concentrate on personal survival. Social conscience was a luxury that most people here could scarcely afford. You needed some rudimentary personal security of your own before you could take from its surplus and apply it to those more needy than yourself—and besides, how many were more needy than they were?

but cowardice and stupidity were not strangers to each other, were they?

When in doubt, a Marine would call a lightpole “Sir.”

But all knew there was more to life than the avoidance of death. Life had to have a purpose, and one such purpose was the service of others.

Hicks hurried himself about to get coffee for everyone, like a page at some medieval court, which was the way of things in the world’s most powerful democracy.

I’ve been in tighter spots than this, Defiance proclaimed. When? Pessimism inquired delicately.

Abuse was the weapon of the coward, after all, and those who applied it knew the fact as well as those who had to accept it.