"We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth." Prologue, p. xii

"Throughout [the Marines training] we were subjected to intense indoctrination, which seemed to borrow from communist brainwashing techniques." Chapter 1, p. 12

"As for the rest, they are now just names without faces or faces without names." Chapter 2, p. 27

"So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own." Chapter 5, p. 81

"It was the same feeling we had experienced on the first operation, a sense of being marooned on a hostile shore from which there was no certainty of return." Chapter 7, p. 113

"The horror lay in the recognition that the body, which is supposed to be the earthly home of an...