" Infantrymen were fighters, not writers. In one way, we prided ourselves on it; we didn’t have time for such “pussy” stuff. But the fact was that infantrymen in Korea came, as a rule, from the bottom rung of the social and economic ladder. The squads were mainly made up of poor whites, blacks, and yellows—a dispensable rainbow—uneducated, with nothing to keep us a step ahead of the point of a bayonet. And if a doughfoot got killed, his parents generally didn’t have the education to write and ask why. They’d silently, stoically wear their loss like a sad badge of honor. In Korea, a heroic, dead comrade-in-arms; at home, a gold star in a cracked window in a little house on the wrong side of the tracks. "

― David H. Hackworth , About Face: Odyssey Of An American Warrior