“I could picture a youngster of a skipper out there with his blown hair and his life jacket and binoculars, rolling to the sea in the Mediterranean dusk.  Some young man who shortly before had perhaps been unaware of any sea at all – the bookkeeper in your bank maybe – and then there he was, a strange new man in command of a ship, suddenly a person with acute responsibilities, carrying out with great intentness his special, small part of the enormous aggregate that is our war on all the lands and seas of the globe.  In his unnatural presence there in the heaving darkness of the Mediterranean, I realized vividly how everybody in America had changed, how every life had suddenly stopped and as suddenly begun again on a different course.  Everything in this world had stopped except war and we were all men of a new profession out in a strange night caring for each other.”
– Ernie Pyle, “Brave Men”