Settling Accounts: Return Engagement

That was either the most brilliant analysis she’d ever heard—or the most breathtakingly cynical one. For the life of her, she couldn't decide which. Maybe it was both at once. Was that better or worse? She couldn't make up her mind there, either.

Hardly anything is more pleasant than talking about why other people are a pack of damn fools.

One of the drawbacks of being President, he’d discovered, was that you couldn’t always call a damn fool a damn fool to his face. Sometimes, no matter how big a damn fool he was, you knew you might need him again one of these days.

Rodriguez remained dubious. Everybody who was an old-timer at this, that, or the other thing always went on and on about how tough things had been before all these new fellows came in. Talk was cheap. Talk was also commonly nonsense.

“How am I?”

“Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

Nothing was worse than a battlefield. Nothing could be. He was convinced of that. The devil hadn't known how to run hell before he took a long look at a Great War battlefield.

And a pair of albatrosses glided along behind the Remembrance. They really did look almost big enough to land. He wondered what they thought of the great ship. Or were they too birdbrained to think at all?

But this was their home. Men came here only to fight. That being so, who really were the birdbrains here?

He didn't feel like a knight in shining armor. He was filthy and fleabitten and probably lousy again. If they would have put him on a train and shipped him home, he wouldn't even have turned around to wave good-bye. He was here because the Army told him to be here and would shoot him if he bailed out, not because he thought God willed it. God was bound to have better things to do with His time.

Security trumped productivity.

You can only bend the long arm of coincidence so far before you break it.

If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic—except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

And now, just to prove how clever the elected rulers of the country were, they’d decided to reprise what hadn’t worked before.

“Every word you say is true,” O’Doull answered. “Every single word. But saying it, no matter how true it is, doesn't make anybody on either side change his mind.”

“People tell me all kinds of things.” Dowling said. “Some of them are true. Some of them help make the flowers grow.”

But when he ached, when he panted, when the world was too much with him, Marx and revolution held a wild temptation. Like cheap booze for a drunk, he thought wearily, except revolutions make people do even stupider things.

Maybe’s a word that makes a lot of people sorry later.

Where there’s a will, there’s a lawyer.

During a war, nobody ever showed up on time, except possibly the enemy.

Chester almost said so—almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He’d learned a wise man didn't antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she’d just given him breakfast.

“You're lucky as hell, kid,” Moss said, glad to have something to talk about besides the pounding of his heart. “That's only a scratch, and you'll get yourself a Purple Heart on account of it.”

“If I'd been lucky, they would have missed me,” the lieutenant said, which held more than a little truth. If he'd been unluckier, though, all the infinite cleverness and articulation of that hand would have been smashed to bloody, bony ruin in less than the blink of an eye.

“‘The Confederate state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race at the center of all life. It must take care to keep itself pure.’”

Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet…Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not.

Cincinnatus stared at him. That had to be the most cynical assessment he'd ever heard in his life, and he'd heard a lot of them. But, along with the cynicism, it made a lot more sense than he wished it did.

It was an eminently sensible question. Moss didn't want good sense, though. He wanted to be told what he wanted to hear. That he was thinking like a three-year-old was a telling measure of how tired he was, but he was too tired to realize it.

A wise husband didn’t quarrel even when he was right. Quarreling when you knew you were wrong was a recipe for disaster.

If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn't matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.

Sometimes convenience counted for more than ideology.

She was willing to give her life for her country. She wasn’t willing to throw it away.

He still couldn't believe she was dead. She’d been one of those fiercely vital people you thought of as going on forever. But life didn't work like that, and war had an obscene power all its own. What it wanted, it took, and an individual’s vitality mattered not at all to it.

Where cool heads had failed, hotheads prevailed.

His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force. We have a clear conscience. We have done all that any country could do to establish peace.