Quotes from Stephen E. Ambrose

If you want to be a hero, the Germans will make one out of you real quick—dead!

When the shooting started, they wanted to look up to the guy beside them, not down.

Crazy Horse called to his men, "Ho-ka hey! It is a good day to fight! It is a good day to die! Strong hearts, brave hearts, to the front! Weak hearts and cowards to the rear.

The replacements, eighteen-and nineteen-year-olds fresh from the States, were wide-eyed. Although the veterans were only a year or two older, they looked terrifying to the recruits.

You lead by fear or you lead by example. We were being led by fear.

We can't make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had.

They knew fear together. Not only the fear of death or wound, but the fear that all this was for nothing.

Before lying down, Winters later wrote in his diary, "I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for his help on D plus one." And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.

He generated maximum anxiety over matters of minimum significance.

In a foxhole, the past and, more important, the future do not exist. The only thing in the world that matters is the moment

Comrades are closer than friends, closer than brothers. Their relationship is different from that of lovers.

There was an excess of drinking, whoring, fighting. Older British observers complained, "The trouble with you Yanks is that you are overpaid, oversexed, and over here." (To which the Yanks would reply, "The trouble with you Limeys is that you are underpaid, undersexed, and under Eisenhower.")

In one of his last newsletters, Mike Ranney wrote: "In thinking back on the days of Easy Company, I'm treasuring my remark to a grandson who asked, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' " 'No,' I answered, 'but I served in a company of heroes.

as Lewis saw it. The White Cliffs can be seen only from small boat or canoe. Put in at Fort Benton and take out three or four days later at Judith Landing. Missouri River Outfitters at Fort Benton, Montana, rents canoes or provides a guided tour by pontoon boat. Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one. We have made the trip ten times.

Although both men were full of resolve, the defender could not keep his doubts out of his mind, while the attacker refused to entertain any doubts. (Rommel vs. Eisenhower)

Leigh Freeman moved his printing press to Laramie and set about publishing the Frontier Index there. In its first issue, May 5 [1868], the paper predicted that Laramie would soon rival Chicago. When it was only two weeks old, the Index boasted, "Laramie already contains a population of two thousand inhabitants.

In the excitement of a charge, or in the enthusiasm of approaching victory, there is a sense of pleasure which no one should attempt to underrate." General Horace Porter, aide-decamp to General Grant Custer

There is nothing like daily decision-making to get the brain functioning and the body moving.

Paul Fussell, in his book Wartime, has the best definition:

mentor, Frederick the Great, had warned, "He who defends everything, defends nothing."6

A man whose birthday was in 1829 or earlier had been born into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than Julius Caesar, a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great's time.

To avoid public mention of any name unless it can be done with favorable intent and connotation; reserve all criticism for the private conference; speak only good in public.

Birth of a Railroad

The contrast between Eisenhower and those generals who gloried in war could not have been greater. Small wonder that millions of Americans in the 1940s felt that if their loved one had to join the fight, Eisenhower was the general they wanted for his commander.