The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo‘s status.

Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.

An adventure is a situation where the outcome is not entirely within your control. It is up to fate, in other words

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.

I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They’re the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They’re taking most of the risks. They’re absorbing most of the casualties. And they’re the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.

No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.

There are photographers who don’t really engage with their subject. It’s a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.

People ask me about ‘The Hurt Locker‘ a lot, and it’s an incredible piece of filmmaking – as are ‘Band of Brothers‘ and ‘Platoon‘ and ‘Full Metal Jacket‘ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’ But they’re not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood‘s idea of war.

Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it’s shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.

No one will remember that President Obama supported the Arab Spring if it eventually fails and the region collapses back into the political Dark Ages. If we actively engage these movements with advice, with money, and, when necessary, with military force, then we get a vote in how it all turns out.

The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.

The combat environment has the effect of flattening out civilian identities. If you’re young or old, or a graduate from Harvard or the son of a farmer from Alabama, or if you’re gay or straight or good-looking or ugly: none of those things matters much in combat, as long as you can conform to the group expectations.

My wife, Daniela, and I live in an old house from 1810 with three fireplaces at the end of a dead-end dirt road on Cape Cod, so I turn the trees into firewood for us and a friend of mine sells the rest.

I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you’re supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it’s not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.

In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence , an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn’t?

The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.

Bad news is dramatic. It makes good TV. If there’s a firefight on the same day that a school opens up, the media will show the firefight even though the school is way more important and will affect the community for much longer.

I don’t think journalists in World War II were objective about the Nazis, and I don’t think they should have been.

I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.

I don’t think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn’t offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we’d steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life.

A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.

I have been working since I was 20, and I’m 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20’s making $10,000 a year.

In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn’t?

I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.

The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That’s why al Qaeda was there in the first place.

Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?

There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn’t any conflict in my mind.

I hope I get married one day.

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. (pg. 144)

The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. — J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors