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some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature.
almost every human need from back home gets fulfilled in some truncated, jury-rigged way. The men are good at constructing what they need from what they have. They are experts at making do.
the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences.
Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore.
The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death.
Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self—you’re
The men ran out of things to say about three months ago, so they just sit around in a mute daze.
over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.
faster than I can get out of its way. “The quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity,” as Melville called it; the last impossible phase shift from being a person to being nothing at all.
