“People tend to see the infantryman, I feel, solely as a man walking along carrying a rifle prepared to do honorable combat, one-on-one with an enemy of our nation. Not so. He is perhaps more aptly pictured as an exhausted, unshaven, miserable, dog-faced foot soldier who crawls face down on his belly in the mud and eats with his hands and whose chief recreation is reading newspaper headlines about the more glamorous branches of the service.”
– R. Blunt Jr., “Foot Soldier”

“Heroes are the people who are bigger than their times. Most of us… are not. History is sometimes made by heroes, but it is also always made by us. We, the people, who stumble around, who block or help the hero out of loyalty, stubbornness, faith, or fear. Those who wall up – and those who break through walls. The people at the edge of the photographs. The people watching. The crowd. You.”
– S. Blake, “the Guest Book”

“You think your predecessors never made mistakes?… Of course they did. Our nation’s history is woven from their errors in judgment, their wrong decisions, as much as it is from their achievements.”
– K. McGee, “American Royals”