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21 " Honors ennoble those on whom they’re bestowed, but they also ease the guilt of those whose commands made them necessary in the first place. A medal is a mirror, reflecting a glory that we force ourselves to believe in. "
― Kathleen Rooney , Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
22 " After the woods our good cheer was quelled by the faint first whiff of a real battlefield, a gagging combination of shit and gunpowder, gas and blood, decaying flesh and muddy rot. "
23 " I immediately understood that all our training—the rehearsal of thoughts and actions, the merging of individual identities into a coordinated and interdependent force—was done in anticipation of this very moment, to stanch the fundamental impulse to flee from such terror. We smelled that death—perhaps the death of civilization—and we kept moving toward it, thereby becoming something more and less than human. "
24 " I had a spot on one of the open lower decks, jammed with men, but my height granted me a view of the Statue of Liberty receding in the golden light, a sentimental sight that nevertheless provoked my sentiments. How many crimes, I wonder now—how many blunders worse than crimes—get committed in her name? "
25 " By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining. "
26 " By showing me to the injured men, the army told them, This fluffy, cooing thing with its wooden leg is what the public will know of the ravages of war. Your task is to remain unseen. By showing me to the public, the army told them, War is a game, and its costs are light enough to be borne by even this little bird. The burgeoning American empire demanded sacrifices; my job was to help make them acceptable, even entertaining. In that limited and perverted sense, I continued to function as a messenger pigeon. "
27 " I knew I could count on President Wilson to refrain from pious claptrap. “Human beings,” he said, millet crunching in his beak, “seem powerfully invested in the notion that suffering improves or ennobles the sufferer. This is, of course, childish nonsense. "
28 " I died when I was little more than two years old, on June 13, 1919, there in the Signal Corps lofts at Camp Vail, New Jersey. One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females. "
29 " Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army’s 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey. "
30 " We soldiers learned vigilance until our technique was flawless and thoughtless; we learned it or we died. But then what? Once we’d ingrained it so deeply as to make it automatic—stay alert, sleep light, trust nothing—we couldn’t unlearn it when the danger had passed. "
31 " Before the war few pastimes afforded me greater pleasure than wandering through the city, ending up somewhere strange. But now, having been twice officially lost—lost as in waylaid, misplaced, unreachable, doomed, lost as in the Lost Battalion—I find the appeal is itself somewhat lost to me. "
32 " Cher Ami, my savior, I grieve you, I think absurdly, eyes to the sky. "
33 " and my men were in the film to grant it authenticity, yet somehow we were the least convincing thing in it. The whole experience was a pungent reminder—a reminder I didn’t need—that in a contest against passion, truth always makes a poor showing. "
34 " The second encirclement would be a disaster, and it would win me commendation and international fame. It would leave my brain full—as it is now, here on the Toloa’s deck—of visions of pleading faces and ruined bodies, of phantom agonies that scour the parts of my consciousness where I once held hope for the future, like the pains that plague a maimed man where a limb’s been cut away. "
35 " Canyons of incomprehension yawn between me and most other human beings, and I keep acting as if it’s possible for me to reach across and join them on their side, to span the gap between who they believe me to be and who I really am. "
36 " Like the angel holding the globe on the statue’s pedestal, we infantry tried to hand the world back to itself intact, though we who fought have been blown apart. Whether the world will hold together remains to be seen. "
37 " It was a good lie, whoever had come up with it. Blaming the Germans wasn’t an option—too many incriminating duds still littered our funkholes—but since the French 75-millimeter gun was also the main field weapon of the American artillery, guilt could be plausibly shifted in that direction. "
38 " Throughout the war I looked back on that evening at the Harvard Club with great fondness, recalling it as the moment when I found my footing among the officers and struck up some of my truest friendships. But then the Pocket tainted my nostalgia, as it tainted everything else. "
39 " No one who’d actually been in the Pocket would believe the explanation, but that didn’t matter. We were symbols now, no longer in control of our own stories. "
40 " Other men may thrill to the sight of Old Glory rippling in the breeze, but for me the library was a better symbol of what I had taken up arms to defend. "