“There they are. Lieutenant Jack Loveday and Lieutenant Alex Wakeman. I’ve only seen their photos so far and the pictures that are in Demos’s head, but the truth is Demos did not do them justice. In fact, Demos’s head needs a tune up or a reboot or an entirely new operating system altogether.”

“I prefer to thin of it as rebooting my ovarian operating system.”

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”

“Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.”

“Unnerved, Summerset moved quickly to the communication center. "Roarke, the lieutenant has just come in from outside. She wore no outer gear. She looks very bad.""Where is she?""She's heading up. Roarke, I insulted her and...she apologized to me. Something must be done.”

“You talked once of bodily dignity.’‘I’ve seen heads shot off.”