Great Throughts Treasury

"Authority can be delegated. Responsibility cannot."

"The future disappeared, and my selfish motives went with it. I existed only in the present. The one thing keeping me going was being part of a group, knowing each mistake made my comrades a little weaker. Group punishment, shunned in most of American society, was a staple at OCS. Platoons fight as groups. They live or die as groups. So we were disciplined as a group."

"“Hardness," I was learning, was the supreme virtue among recon Marines. The greatest compliment one could pay to another was to say he was hard. Hardness wasn't toughness, nor was it courage, although both were part of it. Hardness was the ability to face an overwhelming situation with aplomb, smile calmly at it, and then triumph through sheer professional pride."

"We'll have something like half a million combat veterans trying to reintegrate into American society over the next few years. They can be a source of wisdom or of destruction. It depends on how well we care for them."

"Do nothing but be prepared to do anything."

"It was the first thing that I ever did ... that I did not know how it would end."

"There was a realization that night that we were going. We didn't know where and in what capacity, but we knew we were going."

"You have to get out of the bunker, take your helmet off and talk to the people. A lot of times that's when you get killed."

"Your job is to be the hardest motherfucker in your platoon," he said while pointing at me across the desk. "Do that, and everything else will fall into place." He added that I was assigned to Bravo Company, call sign Hitman, and wished me luck."