"When I was sixteen years old, I thought my dad was the stupidest man I'd ever met in my entire life. I couldn't see why I had to listen to him or take his advice or follow his rules. What did we fight about? You might better ask what we didn't fight about. Every interaction was cause for antagonism and verbal jousting. Simply put, I was an idiot: drinking, hanging out with the boys, chasing girls, ignoring my schoolwork.. getting fat and lazy. My father had been a hard and diligent worker his whole life, so he naturally and understandably found my lack of initiative and my self-destructive tendencies somewhat disturbing. I didn't want to hear it, though. I figured as long as I wasn't being brought home by the cops, I wasn't doing anything wrong. And that wasn't true, of course. It's not the right way to look at life. But at that point in time, that's the way I saw things: through a very narrow and selfish prism."

“I'd be lying if I said that I adjusted quickly and easily to a life without combat. I don't think that's possible.”

“For my wife, Jennifer, and our daughter, Lillian.”

“Soldiers on the ground do not have the luxury of political opinion- it's irrelevant to their existence and their mission. They do what they are told, regardless of how crazy it sometimes seems. Soldiers do not make big decisions; they do not have choices, other than those those that are made in the blink of an eye and have life-and-death consequences. And they accept this responsibility willingly. They seek it out. They fight so that others don't have to fight.”

“There were more bullets in the air than stars in the sky. A wall of bullets at every one at the same time with one crack and then a million other cracks afterwards. They're above you, in front of you, behind you, below you. They're hitting in the dirt early. They're going over your head. Just all over the place. They were close— as close as I've ever seen.”

“All these freedoms and pleasures we enjoy as Americans were bestowed upon us, but they came at a great cost.”

“Every day in the Korengal Valley held the possibility of death. The sun came up every morning and the shooting started shortly thereafter. That's just the way it was. The fact that you might have to kill someone, or that you might be killed, did not burn through your head, because that was life in the valley.”