marines

Hero love?_ I was puzzled. __ou know. The kind of love you have for someone you want to be like: Marines, astronauts, cowboys, teachers, big brothers, that sort of thing. You love them because they represent the you that you want to be.

Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum.

I can see the little girl, the face of the little girl. And as much as people say that they don't care about these people and all that, I don't care about these people - but I do, at the same time, if that makes any sense. They don't want to help themselves, they're blowing us up, yeah, that hurts, but it also hurts to know that I've seen a girl that's as old as my little brother watch me shoot somebody in the head. And I don't care if she's Iraqi, Korean, African, white - she's still a little girl. And she watched me shoot somebody.

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

I__l give you one chance to run,but may your shoulder always whisper in your ear__t__ best to watch out for men, like me.

America's finest - our men and women in uniform, are a force for good throughout the world, and that is nothing to apologize for.

We had it drilled into us time and time again: 'If someone above you falls, grip tightly to the vertical rope and cradle that person in your arms until help can get to you.'...If someone fell down on me I swear I would have bitten him on the ass and would keep on biting until he got off onhis own.

...It is a proud privilege to be a soldier _ a good soldier _ [with] discipline, self-respect, pride in his unit and his country, a high sense of duty and obligation to comrades and to his superiors, and a self confidence born of demonstrated ability.

To hear them laugh was to hear that everything was all right, but to see them laugh was to see otherwise

Alyssa couldn__ tear her gaze from him as the firelight played over the hard edges of him. Once he__ been the poster boy for clean-cut military, now he__ gone all tatted up sexy danger.

That__ why we__e not doing it again. That kind of lust gets out of control and you__l end up scorched._ Lying to yourself now? It wasn__ just Lyssie that would get singed. There was something about this woman that was slipping beneath his skin and stirring the embers of a part of him he__ thought long dead. He shoved that away and firmed his voice. ____ going to be your friend and protector.

It was pretty amazing. I wasn__ thinking about anything but how good it felt to be kissed and touched by you. You totally ruined boring sex for me.

In the simple moral maxim the Marine Corps teaches _ do the right thing, for the right reason _ no exception exists that says: unless there's criticism or risk. Damn the consequences.

It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren't listening. In Holden's navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Donnager, and three of them had made a conscious decision to do so. Holden promised himself that he'd never make fun of them again.

The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one__ country

You may hate the war, but never hate the ones that fight. For they do not choose when or where to fight. All they chose was to protect who they love and even the people they don't know.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel__he whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

And that was my homecoming. It was fine, I guess. Getting back feels like your first breath after nearly drowning. Even if it hurts, it's good.