Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t… — Harry Turtledove

You have to understand what you’re fighting for. Otherwise, you were an animal—a brave animal, maybe, but an animal all the same.

After a case like that, writing about the work O’Doull had done during the war didn’t seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.

Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.