I love book club because it makes me read books I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. The people in this book are very different from me and very far removed from my (small) experience with military. Most of the people I know who go into the military do it through ROTC to pay for graduate school (dental, medical, law), none that have ever seen combat. I am not familiar with the stories of these men. I loved learning about the friendship, the loyalty, just how difficult war is. It made me think of higher level thoughts about peace, conflict and violence.

I was surprised that the reasoning behind the war isn't as important to the frontline men. I gained new insights, appreciation, and respect for those who put their lives on the line for us. In our book club discussion someone mentioned [b:Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging|28119237|Tribe On Homecoming and Belonging|Sebastian Junger|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1459114807s/28119237.jpg|47206763] and this book definitely inspired me to read it. I am really fascinated by the interpersonal relationships and the science/neurology. My only complaint is the writing was a bit disjointed, it wasn't written in a linear fashion which was a bit confusing to me.

There was a lot of language, as you'd expect. Lots of f-words. I wouldn't listen to this on an audiobook but reading it I kinda skipped the language. There was sexual/crude talk as you'd expect. The war scenes were definitely violent..

"Men who had arrived home after a year of combat were put on planes and flown back into the war. Morale plunged"

"It was a weird irony of the war that once you were here --or your son was-- the politics of the whole thing became completely irrelevant until very conservative families and very liberal ones --there were some -- saw almost completely eye to eye"

"Medics are renowned for their bravery, but the ones I knew described it more as a terror of failing to save the lives of their friends"

"Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he'd come to your hooch and play guitar. He took care of his men in every possible way."

"Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else."

"The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound -- even defeat -- a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history."

"The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group."

"Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the cost of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat, the less inclined you are to question it)"

"As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to the that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever."

"Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work."

"Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like profanity."

"What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing."