The arts and soldiering took time to acquire – time and discipline and desire. No, he was up against bullies. And bullies were cowards. These were mercenaries who acted for money. Shot as, on the other hand, took great pride that he performed his DUTIES for love of country and, though he didn't quite think of it in those terms, for love of his fellow soldiers.

Privacy and loneliness were the traditional luxuries accorded to a skipper.

Along the way he also learned one or two things about leadership and national security and what our country is all about and what we're trying to do in the world.

'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.'

God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.