John

“But for the warrior, the seasons are marked not by these sweet measures nor by the calendared years themselves, but by battles. Campaigns fought and comrades lost; trials of death survived. Clashes and conflict from which time effaces all superficial recall, leaving only the fields themselves and their names, which achieve in the warriors memory a stature ennobled beyond all other modes of commemoration, purchased with the holy coin of blood and paid for with the lives of beloved brothers-in-arms.”
― Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire