At this table, a loud voice was just a man venting his stress. A quiet one was far more dangerous.
When you dealt with explosives, you didn’t rush and you didn’t take chances.
History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave. – EDMUND MORRIS.
You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum of their fears.” – Winston Churchill.
There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you. Everyone in this room wanted all the others to look and see a person worthy of respect and trust, and honor.
We sink ships and try to pretend that they’re just ships – things without people in them. It’s dishonest, but we do it anyway.
It was scary, and it was lonely, but it was home for Sergeant Chavez.
He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the International Herald Tribune was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.
These kinder and gentler people never really cared much for individuals. They were too interested in the big-picture issues of the day, forcing square reality pegs into the round theoretical holes of how the world was supposed.
Daughters, he told himself, were God’s revenge on you for being a man: you lived in mortal fear that they might accidentally encounter somebody like – yourself at that age.
First we must accomplish the task at hand. An officer who looks too far ahead stumbles over his own boots.
Sergeant Louis Loiselle was the nearest. Short and dark-haired, he was a former member of French parachute forces and had been detailed to DGSE some years before. Loiselle was vanilla, a utility infielder, good in everything but a nonspecialist specialist – like all of the men, a weapons expert, and, his file said, a brilliant marksman with pistol and rifle. He had an easy, relaxed smile with a good deal of confidence behind it.
It was so strange, how much fear there was in the world, and the most fearful of all were so often those who held the power in their hands.
Irishmen with guns were like squirrels with nuts, always stashing them, and sometimes forgetting where the hell they’d been stashed.
Hitting an airliner was like having a shoot-out in a grammar school, just more crowded.
There is no wall between a tactical and a strategic nuclear exchange, just a fuzzy line in the imagination of the amateurs and academics who advise their political leaders.
What will our Defense Minister do when it becomes obvious even to him that we have failed? Have you considered that? When desperate men realize they have failed – and those desperate men have control of atomic weapons, then what?
Europe would go down first, with its socialized medical-care systems and pliant citizens sure to show up for their shots when summoned, then America, then, in due course, the rest of the world.
It is time my brothers.“Tolkaze handed the AK-47 rifle and ammo belt to his taller friend.
How strange, Popov thought. If the Irish didn’t like the English, then why did they emulate their driving patterns?
Reveille came in the form of an electric buzzer, the kind associated with a cheap alarm clock. That was good news. No bugle – he hated bugles in the morning.