Battlefield Friends Quotes

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.

You'd help if you could, wouldn't you, boy?" I said. "It's no wonder they call you man's best friend. Faithful and loyal and true, you share in our sorrows and rejoice with us in our triumphs, the truest friend we ever have known, a better friend than we deserve. You have thrown in your lot with us, through thick and thin, on battlefield and hearthrug, refusing to leave your master even when death and destruction lie all around. Ah, noble dog, you are the furry mirror in which we see our better selves reflected, man as he could be, unstained by war or ambition, unspoilt by-

Life's a battlefield, and we remain loyal to those who fight for us; those who'd die for us.

A true warrior,” she said, “does not fight because he wishes to but because he has to. A man who yearns for war, a man who enjoys his killing, he is a brute and a monster. No matter how much glory he wins on the battlefield, that cannot erase the fact that he is no better than a rabid wolf who will turn on his friends and family as soon as his foes.

Facing an enemy on the battlefield took courage, but you had your friends beside you. Standing alone against your friends, that was a different kind of courage.

I have a burden on my soul. During my long life, I did not make anyone happy, neither my friends, nor my family, nor even myself. I have done many evil things...I was the cause of the beginning of three big wars. About 800,000 people were killed because of me on the battlefields., and their mothers, brothers, and widows cried for them. And now this stands between me and God.

She’s special. We used to unleash her on ancient battlefields just to see soldiers chop their best friends into pieces before falling on their own swords. (Deimos)

But I suppose if you're friends of Magnus's ..." He went completely still. His runes faded. Then he leaped out of my hand and flew towards Annabeth, his blade twitching as if he was stiffing the air. "Where is she? Where are you hiding the babe?" Annabeth backed towards the rail. "Whoa, there, sword. Personal space?" "Jack, behave," Alex said. "What are you doing?" "She's around here somewhere," Jack insisted. He flew to Percy. "Aha! What's in your pocket, sea boy?" "Excuse me?" Percy looked a bit nervous about the magical sword hovering at his waistline. Alex lowered his Ray-Bans. "Okay, now I'm curious. What do you have in your pocket, Percy? Enquiring swords want to know." Percy pulled a plain-looking ballpoint pen from his jeans. "You mean this?" "BAM!" Jack said. "Who is this vision of loveliness?" "Jack," I said. "It's a pen." "No, it's not! Show me! Show me!" "Uh ... sure." Percy uncapped the pen. Immediately it transformed into a three-foot-long sword with a leaf-shaped blade of glowing bronze.. Compared to Jack, the weapon looked delicate, almost petite, but from the way Percy wielded it I had no doubt he'd be able to hold his own on the battlefields of Valhalla with that thing. Jack turned his point towards me, his runes flashing burgundy. "See Magnus? I told you it wasn't stupid to carry a sword disguised as a pen!" "Jack, I never said that!" I protested. "You did.

Perfectly prepared to be an eavesdropper but unwilling to look like one, Philippa backed quickly towards the door and collided, hard, with an unseen person striding forward equally fast into the room. There was a hiss, more than echoed by herself as the breath was struck from her body. Then two cool, friendly hands held and steadied her, one on her shoulder and one on her flat waist, and a low voice said, ‘Admirable Philippa. I always enter my battlefields in reverse, too. But my own battlefields, my little friend. Not other people’s.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

There are wolves in the night. The soldiers would say that, when I was a girl. My uncles and brothers in war. My friends. Raising me on the battlefield because there was no where else to go. There are wolves, they would say. And there are stories about wolves and girls. Girls in red. All alone in the woods. About to get eaten up. Wolves and girls. Both have sharp teeth.

Sitting in front of my fireplace, basking in it's warm glow gives me time to reflect upon the sacrifices that it has taken for me to enjoy the security of a good home, in a safe environment. I can hear the soft whisper of the snow as it caresses my window and covers the ground outside in a scintillating display of sparkling lights under the full moon. How many times have our service men and women watched this same scene from a foxhole, or camped in some remote part of the world. Thankful for the silence of that moment, knowing it won’t last long. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He/she dresses in fatigues and patrols the world restlessly, ensuring that we can have this peaceful night. Every day they give us the gift of this lifestyle that we enjoy, and every night they watch over us. They are warriors, angels, guardians, friends, brothers, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers, forming a family that stretches back to the beginning of the country. So tonight when you go to bed say a prayer that God watch over those who watch over us, and thank them for their sacrifices, on and off the battlefield. Pray that they have a peaceful night, and will be home soon with their families who also share their burden. Without them we would not have this moment.

My laboratory is like a church because it is where I figure out what I believe. The machines drone a gathering hymn as I enter. I know whom I’ll probably see, and I know how they’ll probably act. I know there’ll be silence; I know there’ll be music, a time to greet my friends, and a time to leave others to their contemplation. There are rituals that I follow, some I understand and some I don’t. Elevated to my best self, I strive to do each task correctly. My lab is a place to go on sacred days, as is a church. On holidays, when the rest of the world is closed, my lab is open. My lab is a refuge and an asylum. It is my retreat from the professional battlefield; it is the place where I coolly examine my wounds and repair my armor. And, just like church, because I grew up in it, it is not something from which I can ever really walk away. My

I recall a battle once,’ said Dickens, looking up at a tree. 'In history, it was. And there was this company, see, and they was a ragtag of different squads and covered in mud in any case, and they found themselves hiding in a field of carrots. So as a badge they all pulled up carrots and stuck them on their helmets so’s they’d know who their friends were and incidentally have a nourishing snack for later, which is never to be sneezed at on a battlefield.’ 'Well? So what?“ said Dibbler. 'So what’s wrong with a lilac flower?’ said Dickens, reaching up and pulling down a laden branch. 'Makes a spanking plume, even if you can’t eat it…’ And now, Vimes thought, it ends.

Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real. The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth. If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture-it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we "grow" our lives-we believe that we "make" them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, snake meaning, make money, make a living, make love. I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, "How does a baby grow?" But an American child will ask, "How do you make a baby?" From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.

The dream of peace, you understand, is a dream that comforts everyone except the soldier on the battlefield. He can't think about peace. He can't hesitate. The soldier lives in the war. In combat, war is his mother, his friend and his god. To believe in anything else is suicide.

Many are accustomed to holding a sword called the First Amendment in one hand and a shield called the Fifth in the other—all the while forgetting that to do so is to deem human relations a battlefield. In many ways this culture of criticism and complaint is the unfortunate reality.

Once my father said that conflicts are between rulers. Those that follow rulers can be perfectly nice, which is how you wind up with two perfectly nice people with daggers to each other's throats. Hyacinthe and I might have been friends, but for the part where we were set on opposite sides of a battlefield.

To be honest, I was also upset about what I knew I was heading into. A whole new school where I’d have to make new friends (if I was lucky, which was unlikely) and avoid being stereotyped as a Native American midget (which was probably inevitable). So I was struggling between feeling worried about my mom and feeling sorry for myself, and being angry at her for deserting me and being angry at myself for being so selfish. Although I tried not to show it, my face probably looked like a battlefield that day.

An up-front enemy is rare now and is actually a blessing. People hardly ever attack you openly anymore, showing their intentions, their desire to destroy you; instead they are political and indirect. Although the world is more competitive than ever, outward aggression is discouraged, so people have learned to go underground, to attack unpredictably and craftily. Many use friendship as a way to mask aggressive desires: they come close to you to do more harm. (A friend knows best how to hurt you.) Or, without actually being friends, they offer assistance and alliance: they may seem supportive, but in the end they’re advancing their own interests at your expense. Then there are those who master moral warfare, playing the victim, making you feel guilty for something unspecified you’ve done. The battlefield is full of these warriors, slippery, evasive, and clever.

One evening in Paris, Hosam told me that he believed that the most important human dramas take place not on battlefields but in the quiet hours.

Here there was no shelter for his soul. There were no houses for a home. It was all a wilderness. It was all a battlefield. It was wild, without a friend. It was all a broken battlefield.

Then go - but beware of private quarrels in such a season of strife. You two may meet some day in mortal conflict on the battlefield. For my part, I would rather slay my friend than my enemy.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Heracliteanism. Only fighting yields Happiness on earth, And on battlefields Friendship has its birth. One in three are friends: Brothers in distress, Equals, facing foes, Free―when facing death!

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

It's both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book and mingle with the great of the earth, counsel with the wise of all time, look into unlived days with prophets. Youth will delight in the heroic figures of Homer; or more modern, will thrill to the silent courage of Florence Nightingale on the battlefield...The power of Cicero's oratory may awaken new ambitions in the middle age, or the absurdity of Don Quixote riding mightily against a windmill may make your own pretentiousness seem ridiculous; if you think the world is against you, get the satisfaction of walking the streets of Athens with Diogenes, lantern in hand in broad daylight in search of an honest man...From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. It is not enough to read newspapers...But to become acquainted with real nobility as walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings.

A King Marches in Loneliness." A king is always lonely. When others are laughing with friends to show off their humor, He is sweating in silence. The king is always lonely, When others are chasing fair maidens, He is bleeding on the battlefield. A king is always lonely. When the whole world is against him, He stared into the front. A king is always lonely. When he is abandoned by all, He is still firmly marching forward, Only to realize his dreams afar.

When Athens loses its hold on its empire, Hera still sees Athena: a grey-feathered owl tilting its head in the town square where men debate philosophy and rationality, striving for sense and understanding; or else a flash of silver in the eyes of someone stacking another roll of papyrus in the public library, the teacher calling his students to lessons, or the woman demonstrating how the loom works to her attentive daughter. At the lush, rolling vineyards, she sometimes thinks she spots the laughing eyes of Dionysus in a jovial winemaker selling his wares. In the forests, she's convinced she catches a flash of Artemis, running in pursuit of a stag, or else she recognises her determined jawline in a defiant girl. In smoky forges, where blacksmiths wipe the sweat from their brows, she feels the patience of Hephaestus; and she is certain that Ares still runs wild on the battlefields, filling every fighter's heart with his destructive rage. Hestia is there, of course, in every kindly friend, at every welcoming hearth. She wonders where they see her - in rebellious wives, she hopes, in the iron souls of powerful queens, in resilient girls who find the strength to keep going.

For Achilles the fatal flaw had been anger. When he was angry, Achilles could not contain himself. Even though it had been foretold that he might die during the Trojan War, once his friend Patroclus was killed, Achilles returned to the battlefield blinded by a black and murderous rage.

—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off. "Hurrah for women's lib, eh?" "The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed." The apocalyptic word jars my attention. "What do you mean, doomed?" She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …" "Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?" Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see." Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch." No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." "Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs. "Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one. "Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do." "Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this." "Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can. "I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?" End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.

Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow.

It’s no one’s fault really,” he continued. “A big city cannot afford to have its attention distracted from the important job of being a big city by such a tiny, unimportant item as your happiness or mine.” This came out of him easily, assuredly, and I was suddenly interested. On closer inspection there was something aesthetic and scholarly about him, something faintly professorial. He knew I was with him, listening, and his grey eyes were kind with offered friendliness. He continued: “Those tall buildings there are more than monuments to the industry, thought and effort which have made this a great city; they also occasionally serve as springboards to eternity for misfits who cannot cope with the city and their own loneliness in it.” He paused and said something about one of the ducks which was quite unintelligible to me. “A great city is a battlefield,” he continued. “You need to be a fighter to live in it, not exist, mark you, live. Anybody can exist, dragging his soul around behind him like a worn-out coat; but living is different. It can be hard, but it can also be fun; there’s so much going on all the time that’s new and exciting.” I could not, nor wished to, ignore his pleasant voice, but I was in no mood for his philosophising. “If you were a negro you’d find that even existing would provide more excitement than you’d care for.” He looked at me and suddenly laughed; a laugh abandoned and gay, a laugh rich and young and indescribably infectious. I laughed with him, although I failed to see anything funny in my remark. “I wondered how long it would be before you broke down and talked to me,” he said, when his amusement had quietened down. “Talking helps, you know; if you can talk with someone you’re not lonely any more, don’t you think?” As simple as that. Soon we were chatting away unreservedly, like old friends, and I had told him everything. “Teaching,” he said presently. “That’s the thing. Why not get a job as a teacher?” “That’s rather unlikely,” I replied. “I have had no training as a teacher.” “Oh, that’s not absolutely necessary. Your degrees would be considered in lieu of training, and I feel sure that with your experience and obvious ability you could do well.” “Look here, Sir, if these people would not let me near ordinary inanimate equipment about which I understand quite a bit, is it reasonable to expect them to entrust the education of their children to me?” “Why not? They need teachers desperately.” “It is said that they also need technicians desperately.” “Ah, but that’s different. I don’t suppose educational authorities can be bothered about the colour of people’s skins, and I do believe that in that respect the London County Council is rather outstanding. Anyway, there would be no need to mention it; let it wait until they see you at the interview.” “I’ve tried that method before. It didn’t work.” “Try it again, you’ve nothing to lose. I know for a fact that there are many vacancies for teachers in the East End of London.” “Why especially the East End of London?” “From all accounts it is rather a tough area, and most teachers prefer to seek jobs elsewhere.” “And you think it would be just right for a negro, I suppose.” The vicious bitterness was creeping back; the suspicion was not so easily forgotten. “Now, just a moment, young man.” He was wonderfully patient with me, much more so than I deserved. “Don’t ever underrate the people of the East End; from those very slums and alleyways are emerging many of the new breed of professional and scientific men and quite a few of our politicians. Be careful lest you be a worse snob than the rest of us. Was this the kind of spirit in which you sought the other jobs?

When you're going to a gunfight, bring all your friends with guns. Having fought many times in coalitions, I believe that we need every ally we can bring to the fight. From imaginative military solutions to their country's vote in the United Nations, the more allies the better. I have never been on a crowded battlefield, and there is always room for those who want to be there alongside us.

There is only silence. A hollow silence for victors and losers all. I am empty. What do I do now? There was always a fear, always a concern, always a reason to hoard weapons and food, always a quest or trial. Now, nothing. Just the wind sweeping in over our battlefield. An empty battlefield filled only with echoes of things lost and learned. Friends. Lessons. Soon it will be a memory. I feel like a lover has died. I yearn to cry. Feel hollow. Adrift. I look for Mustang. Will she still care for me?

Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was. There's a lot of envy and enmity, the author said. And he tried to explain: It's like a sinking raft that too many people are trying to get onto. So any push you can deliver makes the raft a little higher for you. If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

Sergeant Powell would never understand what compelled Henry Gunther to rise up and charge the enemy. Gunther had never been seduced by dreams of battlefield glory. He had lost his sergeant’s stripes and been broken to private for urging a friend, in a censored letter, to stay out of the war. His pointless gesture might have been a last desperate effort to eradicate the stain. Whatever the impulse, Gunther kept advancing, bayonet fixed. The German gunners reluctantly fired a five-round burst. Gunther was struck in the left temple and died instantly. The time was 10:59 A.M. General Pershing’s order of the day would record Henry

In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the "free world" and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own security. Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren't Super and don't like each other terribly much.

I know that a brighter view may be taken, and if the sadder has been emphasized in these letters, it is only because we feel you know less about it. For more has been written about the successes than about the failures, and it seems to us that it is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. Reinforcements of men and women are needed, but, far above all, reinforcements of prayer. And so we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth about the heathen as we find them, the work as it is. More workers are needed. No words can tell how much they are needed, how much they are wanted here. But we will never try to allure anyone to think of coming by painting coloured pictures, when the facts are in black and white. What if black and white will never attract like colours ? We care not for it ; our business is to tell the truth. The work is not a pretty thing, to be looked at and admired. It is a fight. And battlefields are not beautiful. But if one is truly called of God, all the difficulties and discouragements only intensify the Call. If things were easier there would be less need. The greater the need, the clearer the Call rings through one, the deeper the conviction grows: it was God s Call. And as one obeys it, there is the joy of obedience, quite apart from the joy of success. There is joy in being with Jesus in a place where His friends are few ; and sometimes, when one would least expect it, coming home tired out and disheartened after a day in an opposing or indifferent town, suddenly how, you can hardly tell such a wave of the joy of Jesus flows over you and through you, that you are stilled with the sense of utter joy. Then, when you see Him winning souls, or hear of your comrades victories, oh ! all that is within you sings, I have more than an overweight of joy !

By 1914 the world wised up. And you know what we got out of it? Do you know what thousands of years of military uniforms have delivered us? Camouflage. With the advent of camouflage came the inability to distinguish between armies. More soldiers died of friendly fire than at any point in military history. It was like a fun house out there, soldiers facing distorted images of themselves, firing half out of fright. It’d become a matter of hiding, surprise, not unlike using a deer blind to hunt. Surprise was the word of the day. And rightfully so. Everything was an ambush. Can you imagine meeting another army across an open battlefield today? Can you imagine waiting for our generals to formally inaugurate that battle? Shaking hands?! No. Now we hide. We hide because they hide, and they hide because we hide, and everybody’s hiding because nobody wants to be out in the open anymore. The End of Bright Colors.

One of the things that I’ve always felt missing from funerals and services is the voice of the man or woman who was the deceased’s partner in life. I’ve always wanted to hear from the person who’d loved them more than anyone. Biblically, the two become one flesh--the spouse is their other half. It has always seemed to me that his or her voice was critical to truly understanding who the deceased was in life. I also felt that American Sniper had told only part of Chris’s story--an angry part in much of it. There was so much more to him that I wanted the world to know. People said Chris was blessed that I hung in there during his service to our country; in fact, I was the one who was blessed. I wanted everyone to hear me say that. Beforehand, a friend suggested I have a backup in case I couldn’t finish reading my speech--a “highway option,” as Chris used to call it: the way out if things didn’t go as planned. I refused. I didn’t want a way out. It wasn’t supposed to be easy. Knowing that I had to go through with it, that I had to finish--that was my motivator. That was my guarantee that I would finish, that I would keep moving into the future, as painful as it surely would be. When you think you cannot do something, think again. Chris always said, “The body will do whatever the mind tells it to.” I am counting on that now. I stand before you a broken woman, but I am now and always will be the wife of a man who is a warrior both on the battlefield and off. Some people along the way told Chris that through it all, he was lucky I stayed with him. I am standing before you now to set the record straight. Remember this: I am the one who is literally, in every sense of the word, blessed that Chris stayed with me. I feel compelled to tell you that I am not a fan of people romanticizing their loved ones in death. I don’t need to romanticize Chris, because our reality is messy, passionate, full of every extreme emotion known to man, including fear, compassion, anger, pain, laughing so hard we doubled over and hugged it out, laughing when we were irritated with each other and laughing when we were so in love it felt like someone hung the moon for only us… I looked at the kids as I neared the end, talking to them and only them. Tears ran from their faces. Bubba’s head hung down. It broke my heart. I kept reading. Then I was done.

When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17

A tall, well-muscled blond man drew alongside Christian. He inclined his head to them. “Abbot,” he said to Christian in greeting. Christian seemed pleased to see him. “Falcon. It’s been a long time.” “Aye. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to greet you yester eve when you arrived.” Christian offered him a lopsided grin. “’Tis well understood. I heard about your escapade with the butcher’s daughter and your near miss with her father’s cleaver.” Falcon laughed. “Lies all. ’Twas the tanner’s daughter and her father’s ax.” Christian joined his laughter. “One day, my friend, you will meet the one father who can run faster than you.” “’Tis why God gave us horses.” He winked at Christian, then tilted his head so that he could see Adara. “’Tis a pleasure to meet you, Queen Adara. I am Lord Quentin of Adelsbury and my sword is ever at your disposal.” Christian gave him a meaningful stare. “And your sword had best stay sheathed, Falcon, until you’re on the battlefield.” “Your warning is well taken into consideration, Abbot, along with your sword skill and horsemanship. Have no fear of me. Your wife is ever safe from my designs. But no woman is safe from my charm.” Adara couldn’t help teasing the man who seemed of remarkable good spirit and cheer. “However some women might find themselves immune from it, my Lord Falcon.” “What, ho?” he said with a laugh. “Congratulations, Christian. You have found a woman as intelligent as she is beautiful. Tell me, Your Majesty, have you a sister who is fashioned in your image?” “Nay, my lord. I fear I am one of a kind.” He looked sincerely despondent at the news. “’Tis a pity, then. I shall just have to pray for Christian to lay aside his duties and become a monk in earnest.” Christian snorted at that prospect. “You would have a better chance courting my horse.” “Then I shall take my charm and work it on a woman who isn’t immune to it. Good day to you both.” Adara glanced over her shoulder as he fell back into the ranks with the other knights. “Don’t look at him,” Christian said in a teasing tone. “You’ll only play into his overbloated self-esteem.” She gave him a meaningful look. “In that regard, he reminds me of someone else I know.” “Ouch, my lady, you wound me.” “Never, Christian. I would never wound you.

During the war, I was constantly afraid Chris would die. What made it worse was that he told me many times that he wanted to die on the battlefield. Let me refine that. He didn’t want to die, but if he had to die, then he couldn’t imagine anything better than dying on the battlefield. It was part of his sense of duty: dying on the battlefield would mean that he had been doing his utmost to protect others. There was no higher calling, and no higher proof of dedication, for Chris. So there was no sense fearing death in combat. It would be an honor. That idea hurt me. I knew my husband wasn’t reckless--far from it--but in war there is a very thin line between being brave and being foolish, and when Chris talked like that I worried the line might be crossed. I started going to church more during his first deployment, and eventually went to women’s Bible studies to learn more about the Bible. But fitting the idea of God and faith and service together was never easy. What should I pray for? My husband to live, certainly. But wasn’t that selfish? What if that wasn’t God’s will? I prayed Chris would make the right decision when it came time to reenlist or leave the Navy. I wanted him to leave, yet that wasn’t exactly what I prayed for. Yet I was disappointed when he reenlisted. Was I disappointed with God, or Chris? Had my prayers even been heard? If it was God’s plan that he reenlist, I should have been at peace with it. Yet I can’t say that I was. Right after he made his decision, I took a walk with a friend whose faith ran very deep. She knew the Bible much better than I did, and was far more active in the church. I cried to her. “I have to believe this is the best thing for our family,” I told her. “But I don’t know how it can be. I’m really struggling to accept it.” “It’s okay to be angry with God,” she told me. That caught me short. “I--I don’t think we’re supposed to be.” “Why not?” “Well…Jesus was never mad at God, and--“ “That’s wrong,” she said. “Don’t you remember in the temple with the money changers? Or in the garden before he was crucified, his doubts? Or on the cross? It’s okay to have those feelings.” We talked some more. “I do believe that if Chris dies,” I said finally, “God must be saying it’s still okay for our family, even if I don’t know how.” She teared up. “I’m in awe,” she confessed. “I don’t know if I could say that.

Tell me,” Zachary said softly, “what kind of man would ask his best friend to marry his wife after he died? And what kind of man would inspire two seemingly sensible people to agree to such a damned stupid plan?” The man's gray eyes surveyed him in a measuring stare. “A better man than you or I will ever be.” Zachary couldn't stop himself from sneering. “It seems that Lady Holland's paragon of a husband wants to control her from the grave.” “He was trying to protect her,” Ravenhill said without apparent heat, “from men like you.” The bastard's calmness infuriated Zachary. Ravenhill was so damned confident, as if he had already won a competition that Zachary hadn't even known about until it was over. “You think she'll go through with it, don't you?” Zachary muttered resentfully. “You think she'll sacrifice the rest of her life simply because George Taylor asked it of her.” “Yes, that's what I think,” came Ravenhill's cool reply. “And if you knew her better, you'd have no doubt of it.” Why? Zachary wanted to ask, but he couldn't bring himself to voice the painful question. Why was it a foregone conclusion that she would go through with her promise? Had she loved George Taylor so much that he could influence her even in death? Or was it simply a matter of honor? Could her sense of duty and moral obligation really impel her to marry a man she didn't love? “I warn you,” Ravenhill said softly, “if you hurt or distress Lady Holland in any way, you'll answer to me.” “All this concern for her welfare is touching. A few years late in coming, isn't it?” The comment seemed to rattle Ravenhill's composure. Zachary felt a stab of triumph as he saw the man flush slightly. “I've made mistakes,” Ravenhill acknowledged curtly. “I have as many faults as the next man, and I found the prospect of filling George Taylor's shoes damned intimidating. Anyone would.” “Then what made you come back?” Zachary muttered, wishing there were some way to forcibly transport the man back across the Channel. “The thought that Lady Holland and her daughter might need me in some way.” “They don't. They have me.” The lines had been drawn. They might as well have been generals of opposing armies, facing each other across a battlefield. Ravenhill's thin, aristocratic mouth curved in a contemptuous smile. “You're that last thing they need,” he said. “I suspect even you know that.

She said, “Why can’t you see that people care for you?” She said, “I care for you.” “I know that you care. But…” He searched her face. “Anyone would, for a friend.” “You’re more than a friend.” “On the battlefield, you stayed--” “Of course I did.” “You have a strong sense of honor. You always have. I think you think you owe me something.” “I stayed because I love you.” He flinched and looked away. “You don’t mean that.” “Yes, I do.” The night outside seemed to swell against the tent. The lamp smelled like a hot stone. His face slowly opened. He touched her hand as it pressed against his heart. His caress was light, secret, almost unsure of her knuckles, the thin tendons as strong as bone. She felt him become sure. There was no sound when he kissed her. None when she unthreaded the ties of his shirt and found his skin. He grasped her dagger belt, flexed his fingers once around the leather, then simply held on. He whispered something into her mouth that was almost a word. It lost its shape, became something else. He let go. She heard the brush of linen as he drew the shirt over his head, his fingertips grazing the tent’s sloped ceiling as if for balance. His ribs were bound with gauze, his body marked by scars. Old ones, badly healed and raised. Others, pink and fresh. His shoulders bore pale gouges; they looked like sets of claws, almost deliberate, like tattoos. Curious, she touched them. He bit his lip. “That hurts?” “No.” “What is this? What happened?” “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Later.” His hand strayed over her shirt, which was eastern, as Arin’s was, with no collar. Threadbare in places. Frayed at the neck. He worried the cloth there, rubbing it between fingers and thumb. Then he drew her shirt open, and she felt as if reality had grown larger and tremulous: a drop of water on the point of a pin. “Kestrel…I’ve never--” She whispered that this was new for her, too. There was a long pause. “Are you certain you want--” “Yes.” “Because…” “Arin.” “Maybe you--” “Arin.” She laughed, and then so did he, aware that they’d already found the bed. Words had fallen away. Maybe the words lay on the earth, nestled among clothes, curled into the undone dagger belt. Maybe later, language would be recovered and pieced together. Made to make sense. But not now. Now there was touch and taste and sound. When he eased into her, she was glad for the burning lamp, the fuzzy glow of it on his skin. The way it showed the black fall of his wet hair, the flesh and scars that made him. She didn’t look away.

I, Prayer (A Poem of Magnitudes and Vectors) I, Prayer, know no hour. No season, no day, no month nor year. No boundary, no barrier or limitation–no blockade hinders Me. There is no border or wall I cannot breach. I move inexorably forward; distance holds Me not. I span the cosmos in the twinkling of an eye. I knowest it all. I am the most powerful force in the Universe. Who then is My equal? Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? None is so fierce that dare stir him up. Surely, I may’st with but a Word. Who then is able to stand before Me? I am the wind, the earth, the metal. I am the very empyrean vault of Heaven Herself. I span the known and the unknown beyond Eternity’s farthest of edges. And whatsoever under Her wings is Mine. I am a gentle stream, a fiery wrath penetrating; wearing down mountains –the hardest and softest of substances. I am a trickling brook to fools of want lost in the deserts of their own desires. I am a Niagara to those who drink in well. I seep through cracks. I inundate. I level forests kindleth unto a single burning bush. My hand moves the Universe by the mind of a child. I withhold treasures solid from the secret stores to they who would wrench at nothing. I do not sleep or eat, feel not fatigue, nor hunger. I do not feel the cold, nor rain or wind. I transcend the heat of the summer’s day. I commune. I petition. I intercede. My time is impeccable, by it worlds and destinies turn. I direct the fates of nations and humankind. My Words are Iron eternaled—rust not they away. No castle keep, nor towers of beaten brass, Nor the dankest of dungeon helks, Nor adamantine links of hand-wrought steel Can contain My Spirit–I shan’t turn back. The race is ne’er to the swift, nor battle to the strong, nor wisdom to the wise or wealth to the rich. For skills and wisdom, I give to the sons of man. I take wisdom and skills from the sons of man for they are ever Mine. Blessed is the one who finds it so, for in humility comes honor, For those who have fallen on the battlefield for My Name’s sake, I reach down to lift them up from On High. I am a rose with the thorn. I am the clawing Lion that pads her children. My kisses wound those whom I Love. My kisses are faithful. No occasion, moment in time, instances, epochs, ages or eras hold Me back. Time–past, present and future is to Me irrelevant. I span the millennia. I am the ever-present Now. My foolishness is wiser than man’s My weakness stronger than man’s. I am subtle to the point of formlessness yet formed. I have no discernible shape, no place into which the enemy may sink their claws. I AM wisdom and in length of days knowledge. Strength is Mine and counsel, and understanding. I break. I build. By Me, kings rise and fall. The weak are given strength; wisdom to those who seek and foolishness to both fooler and fool alike. I lead the crafty through their deceit. I set straight paths for those who will walk them. I am He who gives speech and sight - and confounds and removes them. When I cut, straight and true is my cut. I strike without fault. I am the razored edge of high destiny. I have no enemy, nor friend. My Zeal and Love and Mercy will not relent to track you down until you are spent– even unto the uttermost parts of the earth. I cull the proud and the weak out of the common herd. I hunt them in battles royale until their cries unto Heaven are heard. I break hearts–those whose are harder than granite. Beyond their atomic cores, I strike their atomic clock. Elect motions; not one more or less electron beyond electron’s orbit that has been ordained for you do I give–for His grace is sufficient for thee until He desires enough. Then I, Prayer, move on as a comet, Striking out of the black. I, His sword, kills to give Life. I am Living and Active, the Divider asunder of thoughts and intents. I Am the Light of Eternal Mind. And I, Prayer, AM Prayer Almighty.

Steps in the IPB Process  First, define the battlefield environment. Identify characteristics of the battlefield that influence both friendly and competitor operations. Establish the limits of the battlefield and identify elements that are unknown but should be known.  Second, describe the battlefield’s effects on operations. This step always includes an examination of terrain and weather but may also include the characteristics of geography and infrastructure and their effects on friendly and threat operations, as well as such factors as politics, civilian press, local population, and demographics.  The third step is to evaluate the competitor. If the competitor is known, determine how it normally organizes for combat and conducts operations under similar circumstances. This information can be drawn from historical databases and well-developed threat models. With new or less well-known competitors, intelligence databases and threat courses of action may have to be developed simultaneously.  Finally, determine the competitor’s possible courses of action. The main question to be answered here is: Given what the competitor normally prefers to do and the effects of the specific environment in which it is operating, what are its likely objectives and courses of action?

We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes—the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.

For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down, in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.

Annoyed, he rubbed his eyes and moved on, closely followed by his friends. Then his hands touched something wet and sticky. In disgust, he looked up. His eyes widened. His fingers were stuck into the eye sockets of a woman’s head. He had seen many indescribably horrible things, but nothing had prepared him for this. Women don’t belong on battlefields. Sickened, he withdrew his hand and rubbed his fingers over his uniform. “What’s up?” Karl asked as he crawled up next to him. He silenced when he glanced at the poor woman’s head.

difference between his government’s ineptitude and his personal generosity. He’d nipped these items from the quartermaster’s store, and he couldn’t do much of that. Now he and Crazy Horse had told stories all evening, war stories, hunting stories, the kinds of tales men of action tell on the way to becoming friends. Crazy Horse had told how his people’s leaders had bargained away what the soldiers had won on the battlefield. Which was how every soldier felt. “Did

Dhanananda’s out of the way.’ ‘But how will that happen? He’s firmly entrenched on the throne. He has Bharat’s largest armed force at his command—a force so terrifying that even Alexander is being forced to turn back.’ ‘Battles needn’t be fought on battlefields, my friend. I’ve always believed that wars are better fought without soldiers and unnecessary bloodshed,

There was a popular and rather clever saying during the 1960s that asked, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” This is not quite as ludicrous a concept as it may seem on the surface. There is a constant danger on the battlefield that, in periods of extended close combat, the combatants will get to know and acknowledge one another as individuals and subsequently may refuse to kill each other. This danger and the process by which it can occur is poignantly represented by Henry Metelmann’s account of his experiences as a German soldier on the Russian front during World War II. There was a lull in the battle, during which Metelmann saw two Russians coming out of their foxhole, and I walked over towards them…they introduced themselves…[and] offered me a cigarette and, as a non-smoker, I thought if they offer me a cigarette I’ll smoke it. But it was horrible stuff. I coughed and later on my mates said “You made a horrible impression, standing there with those two Russians and coughing your head off.”…I talked to them and said it was all right to come closer to the foxhole, because there were three dead Russian soldiers lying there, and I, to my shame, had killed them. They wanted to get the [dog tags] off them, and the paybooks…. I kind of helped them and we were all bending down and we found some photos in one of the paybooks and they showed them to me: we all three stood up and looked at the photos…. We shook hands again, and one patted on my back and they walked away. Metelmann was called away to drive a half-track back to the field hospital. When he returned to the battlefield, over an hour later, he found that the Germans had overrun the Russian position. And although there were some of his friends killed, he found himself to be most concerned about what happened to “those two Russians.” “Oh they got killed,” they said. I said: “How did it happen?” “Oh, they didn’t want to give in. Then we shouted at them to come out with their hands up and they did not, so one of us went over with a tank,” he said, “and really got them, and silenced them that way.” My feeling was very sad. I had met them on a very human basis, on a comradely basis. They called me comrade and at that moment, strange as it may seem, I was more sad that they had to die in this mad confrontation than my own mates and I still think sadly about it.

Octavian hadn’t just lost his best friend. He had lost the man who had helped him build the world’s greatest empire. Agrippa had literally fought Octavian’s battles for him, and the latter’s relative cowardice on the battlefield was well-known. It was rumored that he had once hidden behind a bush while Agrippa had roared his legions ahead to victory, all under the red banner of the new Caesar.

achieved an outcome that he could call a victory by capturing fifty-three women and children. But in the process, he failed to support his detachment of scouts led by Major Joel Elliott. The detachment was killed and butchered by an army of warriors that Custer didn’t know was there. Benteen, for one, never forgave Custer for failing to make a stronger effort to save Elliott and the scouts. Now, Custer faced a similar problem. He believed the noncombatants were running north from the village. But to his south, Reno’s battalion was in danger of being destroyed. He couldn’t capture the noncombatants and save Reno at the same time. As Custer deliberated, his youngest brother, Boston, rode up. Boston had ridden back to the pack train to exchange his horse for a fresh mount. Along the way, he passed Benteen’s battalion, and now he told his brother that Benteen’s men were on the trail to the battlefield and the pack train was only a mile behind them. Custer decided he needed a better view of the landscape. He led his column farther north, across a wide ravine and up onto a high ridge. From there, he saw even more of the village and realized it was even larger than he’d previously believed. He also saw a dust cloud to the south that he thought was a sign of Benteen’s battalion. If Benteen hurried as ordered, he could reunite with Custer in less than half an hour. That thought solidified the decision in Custer’s mind, and Custer explained his plan to his senior officers. Custer split his command into two wings. He told his old friend Captain George Yates to lead the smaller wing, with two of the five companies, over the hills and down a ravine toward the river. Yates would make a big show of acting like he was going to charge across the river and into the village, but in reality, he would secure a place to cross for the rest of the column. Custer would stay with the larger wing—the three companies commanded by Captain Myles Keogh—and wait for Benteen. If Benteen arrived soon, his three companies would join with Keogh’s three companies and rush down to Yates’s position. Then all eight companies would cross the river together and storm the village. If Benteen was delayed, then Keogh’s companies would fire

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. —ABRAHAM LINCOLN, First Inaugural Address, 1861

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Knowledge

How can I explain? You know my parents died several years ago. I’ve no siblings, very few relations. And it didn’t take but one dusty skirmish in Portugal for me to realize— if I died on that battlefield, there would be no one to mourn me, but a handful of old school friends.” He touched her cheek. “No one but you. I did think of you. Constantly. I did remember that perfect, sweet kiss when I was bleeding and starving and pissing scared. It was the thought that kept me going: Cecily Hale cares whether I live or die. I couldn’t risk asking word of you, don’t you understand? I didn’t want to know. Surely I’d learn you’d married one of those twenty-six men queuing up for the pleasure of your hand, and I would have nothing left.” “But I didn’t marry any of them. I waited for you.” “Then you were a fool.” He gripped her chin. “Because that man you waited for . . . he isn’t coming back. I’ve changed, too much. Some men lose a leg in war; others, a few fingers. I surrendered part of my humanity. Just like the ridiculous werestag you’re out here chasing.” “I’m out here chasing you, you idiot!” She buffeted his shoulder with her fist. “You’re the one I love.” -Luke & Cecily

He was never his own best friend, Alexander. On the battlefield, he was solid, calm, and brave, but afterwards, he was like a boy after his first girl-all bragging and no substance. How could the god become so very human?

In a battle, some soldiers of Guru Gobind Singh saw a Sikh named Ghanaya giving water to the enemy. They went to the Guru with their complaint. Ghanaya was called and questioned. Ghanaya’s response was that he had not helped the enemy: as he went around the battlefield, he saw no friend or foe but only the Guru’s face.

A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. ~Proverbs 18:24

Meanwhile, angered by white violence in the South and inspired by the gigantic June 23 march in Detroit, grassroots people on the streets all over the country had begun talking about marching on Washington. “It scared the white power structure in Washington, D.C. to death,” as Malcolm put it in his “Message to the Grassroots” and in his Autobiography.6 So the White House called in the Big Six national Negro leaders and arranged for them to be given the money to control the march. The result was what Malcolm called the “Farce on Washington” on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, then chairman of SNCC and fresh from the battlefields of Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama where hundreds of blacks and their white student allies were being beaten and murdered simply for trying to register blacks to vote, was forced to delete references to the revolution and power from his speech and, specifically, to take out the sentence, “We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Marchers were instructed to carry only official signs and to sing only one song, “We Shall Overcome.” As a result, many rank-and-file SNCC militants refused to participate.7 Meanwhile, conscious of the tensions that were developing around preparations for the march on Washington and in order to provide a national rallying point for the independent black movement, Conrad Lynn and William Worthy, veterans in the struggle and old friends of ours, issued a call on the day of the march for an all-black Freedom Now Party. Lynn, a militant civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, had participated in the first Freedom Ride from Richmond, Virginia, to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1947 and was one of Robert Williams’s attorneys.8 Worthy, a Baltimore Afro-American reporter and a 1936–37 Nieman Fellow, had distinguished himself by his courageous actions in defense of freedom of the press, including spending forty-one days in the Peoples Republic of China in 1957 in defiance of the U.S. travel ban (for which his passport was lifted) and traveling to Cuba without a passport following the Bay of Pigs invasion in order to help produce a documentary. The prospect of a black independent party terrified the Democratic Party. Following the call for the Freedom Now Party, Kennedy twice told the press that a political division between whites and blacks would be “fatal.

You’ll be remembered for decades,” Fenwick said. “Perhaps centuries. Don’t tell me that it means nothing to you.” Christopher shook his head slightly, his gaze locked on the other man’s face. “There is an ancient tradition of military honor in my family,” Fenwick said. “I knew that I would achieve the most, and be remembered the longest. No one ever thinks about the ancestors who led small lives, who were known principally as husbands and fathers, benevolent masters, loyal friends. No one cares about those nameless ciphers. But warriors are revered. They are never forgotten.” Bitterness creased his face, leaving it puckered and uneven like the skin of an overripe orange. “A medal like the Victoria Cross--that is all I’ve ever wanted.” “A half ounce of die-stamped gunmetal?” Christopher asked skeptically. “Don’t use that supercilious tone with me, you arrogant ass.” Oddly, despite the venom of the words, Fenwick was calm and controlled. “From the beginning, I knew you were nothing more than an empty-headed fop. Handsome stuffing for a uniform. But you turned out to have one useful gift--you could shoot. And then you went to the Rifles, where somehow you became a soldier. When I first read the dispatches, I thought there had to be some other Phelan. Because the Phelan of the reports was a warrior, and I knew you hadn’t the makings of one.” “I proved you wrong at Inkerman,” Christopher said quietly. The jab brought a smile to Fenwick’s face, the smile of a man standing at a distance from life and seeing unimaginable irony. “Yes. You saved me, and now you’re to get the nation’s highest honor for it.” “I don’t want it.” “That makes it even worse. I was sent home while you became the lauded hero, and took everything that should have been mine. Your name will be remembered, and you don’t even care. Had I died on the battlefield, that would have at least been something. But you took even that away.

In another invaluable service to the Allies, the resistance movements in every captive country helped rescue and spirit back to England thousands of British and American pilots downed behind enemy lines, as well as other Allied servicemen caught in German-held territory. In Belgium, for example, a young woman named Andrée de Jongh set up an escape route called the Comet Line through her native country and France, manned mostly by her friends, to return Britons and Americans to England. De Jongh herself escorted more than one hundred servicemen over the Pyrenees Mountains to safety in neutral Spain. As de Jongh and her colleagues knew, being active in the resistance, regardless of gender, was far more perilous than fighting on the battlefield or in the air. If captured, uniformed servicemen on the Western front were sent to prisoner of war camps, where Geneva Convention rules usually applied. When resistance members were caught, they faced torture, the horrors of a German concentration camp, and/or execution. The danger of capture was particularly great for those who sheltered British or American fighting men, most of whom did not speak the language of the country in which they were hiding and who generally stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. As one British intelligence officer observed, “It is not an easy matter to hide and feed a foreigner in your midst, especially when it happens to be a red-haired Scotsman of six feet, three inches, or a gum-chewing American from the Middle West.” James Langley, the head of a British agency that aided the European escape lines, later estimated that, for every Englishman or American rescued, at least one resistance worker lost his or her life. Andrée de Jongh managed to escape that fate. Caught in January 1943 and sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, she survived the war because, although she freely admitted to creating the Comet Line, the Germans could not believe that a young girl had devised such an intricate operation. IN

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.58

Avigail Stern, daughter of a rabbi, and Rebekah Weizmann, whose crime against the Reich was to have a father that was a prominent Jewish industrialist. They became firm friends in a place where friendship inevitably meant pain and loss. Avigail said, “In the camp infirmary, the SS doctors subjected the prisoners to medical experiments, causing terrible wounds that imitated those sustained by soldiers on the battlefield. They treated us with various experimental medicines to prevent infections. Some worked, some did not. Testing was also done on amputation techniques and setting and transplanting bones. Most of the women died.

May 3 MORNING “In the world ye shall have tribulation.” — John 16:33 ART thou asking the reason of this, believer? Look upward to thy heavenly Father, and behold Him pure and holy. Dost thou know that thou art one day to be like Him? Wilt thou easily be conformed to His image? Wilt thou not require much refining in the furnace of affliction to purify thee? Will it be an easy thing to get rid of thy corruptions, and make thee perfect even as thy Father which is in heaven is perfect? Next, Christian, turn thine eye downward. Dost thou know what foes thou hast beneath thy feet? Thou wast once a servant of Satan, and no king will willingly lose his subjects. Dost thou think that Satan will let thee alone? No, he will be always at thee, for he “goeth about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” Expect trouble, therefore, Christian, when thou lookest beneath thee. Then look around thee. Where art thou? Thou art in an enemy’s country, a stranger and a sojourner. The world is not thy friend. If it be, then thou art not God’s friend, for he who is the friend of the world is the enemy of God. Be assured that thou shalt find foemen everywhere. When thou sleepest, think that thou art resting on the battlefield; when thou walkest, suspect an ambush in every hedge. As mosquitoes are said to bite strangers more than natives, so will the trials of earth be sharpest to you. Lastly, look within thee, into thine own heart and observe what is there. Sin and self are still within. Ah! if thou hadst no devil to tempt thee, no enemies to fight thee, and no world to ensnare thee, thou wouldst still find in thyself evil enough to be a sore trouble to thee, for “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Expect trouble then, but despond not on account of it, for God is with thee to help and to strengthen thee. He hath said, “I will be with thee in trouble; I will deliver thee and honour thee.

The spirit of Bhagavad-gītā is mentioned in Bhagavad-gītā itself. It is just like this: if we want to take a particular medicine, then we have to follow the directions written on the label. We cannot take the medicine according to our own whim or the direction of a friend. It must be taken according to the directions on the label or the directions given by a physician. Similarly, Bhagavad-gītā should be taken or accepted as it is directed by the speaker himself. The speaker of Bhagavad-gītā is Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa. He is mentioned on every page of Bhagavad-gītā as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Bhagavān. Of course the word "bhagavān" sometimes refers to any powerful person or any powerful demigod, and certainly here Bhagavān designates Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa as a great personality, but at the same time we should know that Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, as is confirmed by all great ācāryas (spiritual masters) like Śaṅkarācārya, Rāmānujācārya, Madhvācārya, Nimbārka Svāmī, Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu and many other authorities of Vedic knowledge in India. The Lord Himself also establishes Himself as the Supreme Personality of Godhead in the Bhagavad-gītā, and He is accepted as such in the Brahma-saṁhitā and all the Purāṇas, especially the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, known as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam). Therefore we should take Bhagavad-gītā as it is directed by the Personality of Godhead Himself. In the Fourth Chapter of the Gītā the Lord says: (1) imaṁ vivasvate yogaṁ proktavān aham avyayam vivasvān manave prāha manur ikṣvākave 'bravīt (2) evaṁ paramparā-prāptam imaṁ rājarṣayo viduḥ sa kāleneha mahatā yogo naṣṭaḥ parantapa (3) sa evāyaṁ mayā te 'dya yogaḥ proktaḥ purātanaḥ bhakto 'si me sakhā ceti rahasyaṁ hy etad uttamam Here the Lord informs Arjuna that this system of yoga, the Bhagavad-gītā, was first spoken to the sun-god, and the sun-god explained it to Manu, and Manu explained it to Ikṣvāku, and in that way, by disciplic succession, one speaker after another, this yoga system has been coming down. But in the course of time it has become lost. Consequently the Lord has to speak it again, this time to Arjuna on the Battlefield of Kurukṣetra.

At last, when the dust settled, the Queen and the Jinni stood on the mountaintop and looked down on the battlefield and the bodies spread like leaves across the desert. The Queen fell to her knees, wearied and wounded, and her sword dropped from her hand. Before her, the doorway to Ambadya burned with fires of every color. “All I wanted,” said the Queen, “was peace between our peoples. But I see now that this is not possible, for my people are ruled by a dreamer, and the jinn are ruled by a monster. My only consolation is that thou art by my side, my Jinni. I would die in the company of a friend, and give thee my final breath. For I have one wish remaining, and it is for thy freedom, yea, even at the cost of mine own life.” At this the Jinni shook her head, replying, “Nay, my queen. The time for wishing is passed. For here is the Shaitan, Lord of all Jinn and King of Ambadya.” And even as she spoke, the fires in the doorway rose higher, and through them stepped Nardukha the Shaitan, terrible to behold. “O impudent woman,” said the Shaitan, looking down at the Queen. “Wouldst thou dare make the Forbidden Wish?” “I would,” she replied. “For I fear thee not.” “Then thou art a fool.” As the Queen’s heart turned to ashes, realizing her doom was upon her, the Shaitan turned to the Jinni and said, “Dost thou recall the first rule of thy kinsmen, Jinni?” And the Jinni replied, “Love no human.” “And hast thou kept this commandment?” “Lord, I have.” And up she rose, as the Queen cried out in dismay. “Are not we like sisters?” asked the Queen. “Of one heart and one spirit?” And the Jinni replied, “Nay, for I am a creature of Ambadya, and thus is my nature deceitful and treacherous. My Lord has come at last, and I would do all that he commands.” The Shaitan, looking on with approval, said to the Jinni, “This human girl is proud and foolish, thinking she could rule both men and jinn. I am well pleased with thee, my servant, who hast brought her to me. Slay the queen and prove thy loyalty to thy king.” And the Jinni grinned, and in her eyes rose a fire. “With pleasure, my Lord.” Then, with a wicked laugh, she struck down the good and noble Queen, the mightiest and wisest of all the Amulen monarchs, whose only mistake was that she had dared to love a Jinni.

am loth to close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies, but fellow countrymen and brethren friends. We must not be enemies. AlThough passion may have has strained, it must not break our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords of memory, stretching which proceeding from every so many battle-fields, and so many patriot graves, to every living pass through all the hearts and all the hearthstone, all overin this broad land, continent of ours will yet again swell the chorus of the Union, harmonize in their ancient music when again touched breathed upon, as surely they will be, by the guardian angel of the nation. better angels of our nature.   Lincoln’s

You must also remember the yellow-hair may give you many more children than a Comanche woman. Take care or you could father more children than you can feed. I’ve never seen a white woman yet who wasn’t a good breeder.” A slow grin spread across Hunter’s mouth. “You will tell her this, yes? So far she isn’t showing the proper enthusiasm.” “She’ll come around. Give her time. Be patient. The rewards will be worth the wait.” Hunter tossed aside the poker and rose. “I will think long on your words.” “You sound like a man with eyes going two different directions. What maiden in the village entices you?” “There is no one.” “Hmmph. Bullheaded, just as I suspected. I used to hope you might outgrow it. I see you never will.” “I have the strongest arm in my lodge circle. Her pouting will not sway me. If that’s being bullheaded, then I sure enough am.” Many Horses rolled his eyes. “You think my arm is not the strongest?” “I think you should fight your battles with men on the battlefield, my son, where you have a chance of winning. That is what I think. But when have you ever listened to me?” He reached for the bow he was so skillfully crafting. “I suppose you must learn life’s lessons your own way.” Choosing to ignore his father’s digs, Hunter said, “It’s a very small bow. Who is it for?” “Turtle,” Many Horses replied with a mischievous smile. “At my age, there is little pleasure in life. It is time I watched my grandson learn to shoot. I and my friends are placing bets. I have two horses that say he will shoot Warrior in the thigh. Old Man thinks it will be in the rump. Want to wager?” Hunter’s smile turned wry. “I don’t think so. If I recall, I told Warrior that I would teach Turtle how to shoot.” Many Horses nodded, then quirked an eyebrow. “So it’s your thigh I’m wagering on, eh? Hmm. Sometime today, bring your yellow-hair by to meet me.” “Why?” “She may want to bet with us.” “My yellow-hair?” Many Horses grinned. “If Turtle aims a little high, think of all the grief he might save her.” Hunter gave a snort of disgust and left the lodge.

I’m certain every last one of them fell hopelessly in love with you. How many proposals have you rejected in the past four years? A hundred or more, I’m sure.” “Twenty-six.” Luke slowed as the cottage came into view—a tidy, thatched-roof dwelling hunched between two tall pine trees. “Twenty-six,” he repeated, coming to a stop. She turned to him, clutching his hand tight. “Yes. Twenty-six. Not counting the invalid soldiers.” The color of her eyes deepened to an intense cobalt blue. “You cannot know how I have fought for you, Luke. Not in the same way you have suffered, to be sure. But I have waged my own small battles here. I have fought the pressure to marry, fought the envy for my friends who did. I have struggled against my own desire for companionship and affection.” Her voice broke. “I am not a woman formed for solitude.” “I know it,” he whispered, raising his free hand to her cheek. “I know it. That’s why you need a husband who can—” “I have fought despair,” she interrupted, “when months, years passed with no word of you.” Guilt twisted in his gut. “I could not have written. We weren’t engaged.” “Yes, but you might have written Denny. Or any one of our mutual friends. You might have casually asked for word of me.” “I didn’t want word of you.” She recoiled, and he whipped an arm around her waist, pulling her close. “How can I explain? You know my parents died several years ago. I’ve no siblings, very few relations. And it didn’t take but one dusty skirmish in Portugal for me to realize—if I died on that battlefield, there would be no one to mourn me, but a handful of old school friends.” He touched her cheek. “No one but you. I did think of you. Constantly. I did remember that perfect, sweet kiss when I was bleeding and starving and pissing scared. It was the thought that kept me going: Cecily Hale cares whether I live or die. I couldn’t risk asking word of you, don’t you understand? I didn’t want to know. Surely I’d learn you’d married one of those twenty-six men queuing up for the pleasure of your hand, and I would have nothing left.” “But I didn’t marry any of them. I waited for you.” “Then you were a fool.” He gripped her chin. “Because that man you waited for . . . he isn’t coming back. I’ve changed, too much. Some men lose a leg in war; others, a few fingers. I surrendered part of my humanity. Just like the ridiculous werestag you’re out here chasing.” “I’m out here chasing you, you idiot!” She buffeted his shoulder with her fist. “You’re the one I love.” He

Is it true that the literary world is mined with hatred, a battlefield rimmed with snipers where jealousies and rivalries are always being played out? asked the NPR interviewer of the distinguished author. Who allowed that it was. There’s a lot of envy and enmity, the author said. And he tried to explain: It’s like a sinking raft that too many people are trying to get onto. So any push you can deliver makes the raft a little higher for you.

If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole," said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky. Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the sun gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre became silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the waves of the current beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew felt as if the sound of the waves kept up a refrain to Pierre's words, whispering: "It is true, believe it." He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at Pierre's face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his superior friend. "Yes, if it only were so!" said Prince Andrew. "However, it is time to get on," he added, and, stepping off the raft, he looked up at the sky to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield; and something that had long been slumbering, something that was best within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul. It vanished as soon as he returned to the customary conditions of his life, but he knew that this feeling which he did not know how to develop existed within him. His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince Andrew's life. Though outwardly he continued to live in the same old way, inwardly he began a new life.

he questioned the book’s basic premise: that the women who survive (or don’t survive) a war are equally heroic as their menfolk. The men go and fight, the women don’t, was his essential argument. Except that women do fight (not least Penthesilea and her Amazons), even if the poems heralding their great deeds have been lost. And men don’t always: Achilles doesn’t fight until book eighteen of the twenty-four-book Iliad. He spends the first seventeen books arguing, sulking, asking his mother for help, sulking some more, letting his friend fight in his stead, offering advice and refusing apologies. But not fighting. In other words, he spends almost three-quarters of the poem in a quasi-domestic setting, away from the battlefield. Yet we never question that he is a hero.

Christ is our God who ordered us to pray for our offenders and to do good to them. He also said that no one of us can show greater love in life than he who gives his life for his friends. That is why we generously endure offences caused us as private people. But in company we defend one another and give our lives in battle for our neighbours, so that you, having taken our fellows prisoners, could not imprison their souls together with their bodies by forcing them into renouncing their faith and into godless deeds. Our Christ-loving soldiers protect our Holy Church with arms in their hands. They safeguard the sovereign in whose sacred person they respect the image of the rule of the Heavenly King. They safeguard their land because with its fall the home authority will inevitably fall too and the evangelical faith will be shaken. These are precious pledges for which soldiers should fight to the last. And if they give their lives in battlefield, the Church will include them in the community of the holy martyrs and call them intercessors before God.

I am Trans. This is MY struggle and MY fight. You can be an ally, a friend, a lover, or simply leave me alone. I have enough pain, doubt, and crisis to fill a warehouse. So please, just let me be on my own battlefield in peace.

Citizens associate the art of diplomacy with peace, without considering that there is as much cruelty in diplomacy as on the battlefield.

Women can be the best and worst of friends to other women. At worst, they can be spiteful, vicious and cruel, bending your soul into a twist of misery. Not permitted to fight as men do, out in the open and with weapons, they fight with word and thought, striking enemies with cunning, hitting subtly, often without warning. And at their best, women are remarkable; supportive, warm, motherly, sisterly and friendly by turns, people who would throw themselves before death to protect someone they loved. Men will say they do the same in war, but on a battlefield men fight for themselves first. Wars are won by the desperation of men clinging to life. Only the few and courageous fight truly for friends and brothers. But every person on the earth under God has had a woman do it for them. Every mother risks death for her children.

The following chapters will explore some of the more formalized “content cartels” in further detail, but in seeking to illustrate how backdoor agreements further increase the existing repression, one example stands out: the close relationship between Facebook and the Israeli government. For Palestinians, many of whom are physically cut off from the world by occupation and border controls, the internet is—in the words of author Miriyam Aouragh—“a mediating space through which the Palestinian nation is globally ‘imagined’ and shaped,” bringing together a dispersed diaspora along with a geographically fragmented nation.24 Social media has not only enabled long-lost relatives and friends to come together virtually, but has also provided space for organizing and the development of an alternate narrative to that provided by the mainstream media, which has long privileged the Israeli political position over that of the Palestinian one. But just as Palestinian activist voices have been historically devalued and silenced by mainstream media, so too have they been censored by social media platforms—while Israeli hate speech on the same platforms often goes ignored. In the summer of 2014, a few months after US-brokered peace talks faltered, three Israeli youth were kidnapped and murdered in the occupied West Bank. In retaliation, three Israeli men abducted and murdered a Palestinian teenager, leading to increased tensions, violent clashes, and an increase in rockets fired by Hamas into Israeli territory. Israel responded with airstrikes, raining rockets into Gaza and killing more than two thousand Palestinians and injuring more than ten thousand more—a majority of whom were civilians. As the violence played out on the ground, social media became a secondary battlefield for both sides, as well as their supporters and detractors.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

What do you think it was like to come from a life involving years of hardship and turmoil and boredom and danger and responsibility, and battlefields that stank of blood and mud and worse, with the screams of and groans of the injured and dying-some of them your men and your friends-ringing in your ears? And then the war is over and you come back and try to fit into a society where people are dressed in satin, silk and lace, smelling of perfumes and their most serious problem is deciding who to dance with. Or what to order for dinner. Or how to dress their hair. Or what juicy snippets of gossip they can pass on.

The Cauldron shattered into three pieces, peeling apart like a blossoming flower—and then she came. She exploded from that mortal shell, light blinding us. Light and fire. She was roaring—in victory and rage and pain. And I could have sworn I saw great, burning wings, each feather a simmering ember, spread wide. Could have sworn a crown of incandescent light floated just above her flaming hair. She paused. The thing that was inside Amren paused. Looked at us—at the battlefield and all of our friends, our family still fighting on it. As if to say, I remember you. And then she was gone.

When will humanity, which has experienced countless natural disasters, realize that the universe we live in is a formidable battlefield? The universe is the most interesting friend of every living creature, because it is both our greatest friend and our worst enemy! The greatest weapon against the enmity of the universe is science. The technical shields that science offers us are the most effective weapons we can use against storms, earthquakes, fires and cosmic disasters!

With all the losses we must endure, let us never forget that the kindness of a stranger can help a person in more ways than we can ever know. Do not feel that you are sitting idly by, knitting comforts or mixing another pudding for the Christmas parcel. Take a moment to comfort a friend. Check on elderly neighbors. Such small acts, when multiplied across all the streets of our great nation, can become acts of immense importance. They can have as much impact as the bombs the enemy dares to drop on our cities. A woman's war may not be fought on the battlefield, but it can be won in small victories every day.

If choosing to love first can change enemies into friends on the battlefield of Iraq, I know that it can right here, in our own neighborhoods, churches, and families, who are battling over politics, religion, migrants at the border, and who belongs in America. Love is the foundation I'm planting feet on.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. The

My other friends stared at me aghast, as if I’d just pulled the pin out of a grenade. (I did that once on the battlefield in Valhalla before I fully understood how grenades worked. It had not ended well for the grenade or for me.)

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affections. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

As summer and winter comes and goes Impermanent are friends and foes Arising from one sense of perception Suffering from our limited comprehension One must learn to humbly tolerate And be free of attachment headache

49.​TRUE OR FALSE: 2006’S CASINO ROYALE WAS THE FIRST BOND MOVIE THAT COULD BE WATCHED IN CHINA. True. It was the first film in the James Bond series that the Chinese censor board approved. 50.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE FIRST INTERRACIAL KISS IN TELEVISION HISTORY HAPPENED ON STAR TREK. True. Although the network originally didn’t want to air it, William Shatner reportedly sabotaged all of the other shoots, forcing the network to run the kiss. 51.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE FIRST TELEVISION COMMERCIAL EVER WAS A CAR COMMERCIAL. False. It was actually a commercial for watches, and it aired in 1941. 52.​TRUE OR FALSE: ACTOR JIM CAVIEZEL WAS STRUCK BY LIGHTNING WHILE PORTRAYING JESUS IN THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST. True. Caviezel suffered a large number of calamities during the filming, but this one seemed like a bit of an omen. 53.​TRUE OR FALSE: BRYAN ADAMS’ FAMOUS SONG “SUMMER OF ‘69” IS NAMED AFTER THE SEX POSITION, NOT THE YEAR. True. In fact, Adams was just 9 years old during the summer of 1969. 54.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE ROLLING STONES PERFORMED IN BACK TO THE FUTURE 3. False. But ZZ Top did! 55.​TRUE OR FALSE: THE WORD “FUCK” WAS ONCE SAID OVER 1,000 TIMES IN ONE MOVIE. False. But Swearnet: The Movie came close with the word appearing 935 times—a record amount! 56.​TRUE OR FALSE: BATTLEFIELD EARTH WAS WRITTEN BY THE FOUNDER OF SCIENTOLOGY. True. L. Ron Hubbard was a well-known science fiction writer in addition to being the founder of Scientology.

Since I was a child, I’ve had precognitive dreams and waking “visions.” Ever since I can remember, I’ve been acutely aware of the energy of buildings and old battlefields and have often seen and interacted with spirits. I’ve had out-of-body experiences, given accurate psychic readings for friends and strangers, and journeyed through worlds and dimensions as shamans do. As

Just look at that. That evil grin. She looks thrilled. She’s so happy to have a place to fight. Without a doubt, she’s going to end up being the most horrible person I know. And she’ll probably also be one of my most reliable friends on the battlefield.

There Is the Effect of Moonlight very poetic and the first time he used the telephone he yelled the reason being so he said because my friend is so very far away and if you think I'm going to tell you what else I saw you're crazy as hell

When the time comes, fight with all your heart. We’re warriors, Hadjar. We don’t stay at home and wait for our wife to milk the goats and cook us dinner. No, our dinner is the enemy’s flesh and blood. We don’t die in our beds, surrounded by our children and their children. No, we die in our own shit, on the battlefield, amongst the stench and corpses of our comrades. We don’t sow, we don’t plow, we don’t write poetry, we don’t sing ballads. We fight, Hadjar. We fight so that others can caress their tired spouses, hold their grandchildren, paint great works of art, and write songs. Preferably about us. We’re warriors, Hadjar. Our hands are covered in the blood of our friends and enemies alike. But that doesn’t mean that we have to suffer for it. And that’s why I’m telling you to enjoy your life. What is your life, disciple? What is the life of a warrior?” He gripped the Black Blade. The answer was simple: a warrior’s life was their sword. The only thing that stayed with them until their death. Hadjar opened his eyes. He looked at the world around him as if he were seeing it for the first time. His heart was still beating, pumping blood through his veins. If his heart was still beating, his sword wasn’t broken. His sword was his heart. Every wind current that was one with him was his sword. Every rustle of the autumn leaves that was one with him was his sword. Every ray of sunshine, every unshed tear, every musical note, every speck of dust, every stone… was his sword. The world was one with him, and therefore, with his sword as well. But if the world and Hadjar were one with his sword, then who wielded the blade? The same person who controlled his life — Hadjar. Tarisfal Orune, the greatest swordsman in the history of Darnassus, hadn’t committed suicide, but had instead taught his disciple his last and most important lesson: Hadjar ruled his life and his sword. And his sword ruled the world around him.

When the time comes, fight with all your heart. We’re warriors, Hadjar. We don’t stay at home and wait for our wife to milk the goats and cook us dinner. No, our dinner is the enemy’s flesh and blood. We don’t die in our beds, surrounded by our children and their children. No, we die in our own shit, on the battlefield, amongst the stench and corpses of our comrades. We don’t sow, we don’t plow, we don’t write poetry, we don’t sing ballads. We fight, Hadjar. We fight so that others can caress their tired spouses, hold their grandchildren, paint great works of art, and write songs. Preferably about us. We’re warriors, Hadjar. Our hands are covered in the blood of our friends and enemies alike. But that doesn’t mean that we have to suffer for it. And that’s why I’m telling you to enjoy your life. What is your life, disciple? What is the life of a warrior?” He gripped the Black Blade. The answer was simple: a warrior’s life was their sword. The only thing that stayed with them until their death.

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours? During my second tour in Iraq, I was commander of SEAL Team Three, Task Unit Bruiser. We were deployed to the war-torn city of Ramadi, the epicenter of the insurgency at the time. Only a few weeks into the deployment, we conducted a large operation in conjunction with U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. Marines, and friendly Iraqi Army soldiers. There were multiple elements on the battlefield, all engaged in heavy enemy contact. In the fog of war, mistakes were made. Bad luck emerged. Things went wrong. There ended up being a vicious firefight between one of my SEAL elements and a friendly Iraqi unit. An Iraqi soldier was killed and several others were wounded, including one of my SEALs. It was a nightmare. While there was plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of people who had made mistakes, I realized there was only one person to blame: me. I was the commander. I was the senior man on the battlefield, and I was responsible for everything that happened. Everything. As a leader, there is no one else to blame. Don’t make excuses. If I don’t take ownership of problems, I can’t solve them. That’s what a leader has to do: take ownership of the problems, the mistakes, and the shortfalls, and take ownership of creating and implementing solutions to get those problems solved. Take ownership.

NFL player named Pat Tillman who played for the Arizona Cardinals quit football, turning down a several million dollar contract to join the Army so he could fight in the War on Terror. He was later killed on the battlefield and quickly became a poster boy of bravery and a recruiting tool for the military.571 He was hailed as the NFL hero who supposedly died in a firefight with the enemy, but it later came out that he actually died from friendly fire that came from one or several men from his own unit.572 Tillman’s own mother would later denounce the military for using her son as a “propaganda tool.”573