For weredonut: "Chris and Joey are military commanders, sharing the stress of trying to keep their boys safe."

"Sand for brains. Sand for brains, all of them, every single last fucking one, and if I'm ever in the same room as one of them when we get home I swear to God I'm going to wind up with a dishonorable discharge and a life sentence because I'm going to fucking write their fucking epitaphs. In blood. On the walls. With my bare hands."

"Joey," Chris said, and leaned over the table to grab Joey's wrist and hold him still. "It's not the smartest thing that they've ever done, no, but we don't have the whole picture. There might be something big going on that we just don't know about. We don't have the intel, we don't have the troop movements, we don't have the unit diagrams, we don't have shit. We have to just believe that they're not doing something stupid, and do what they tell us to do, and take our boys with us, and do our best to keep them from coming home in boxes."

"Yeah," Joey said, tight and vibrating with the fury underneath Chris's fingertips. "Trust that some desk-driving asshole back in DC has any idea what they're doing when they haven't been out here and seen these boys and looked them in the eye. Trust that they know that they've got a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears fucking kids sitting over here and waiting for the marching orders to come in and waiting for us to take those orders and make them into something that makes sense. We're nothing but fucking chess pieces on the chess board to them, dammit, and I'm fucking sick of seeing those shit-for-brains airheaded orders and having to look at them and try to figure out what the fuck they're thinking."

"It's war," Chris said, with a sigh, and rubbed his hands over his eyes. "People die in war."

"We die in war. They die in war. They don't deserve that, Chris. They deserve to be painting the front porch in Buttfuck, Nebraska, with a pitcher of lemonade sitting on the table and the prettiest girl in town sitting in the porch swing."

"They signed up for it," Chris said, and felt immeasurably old.

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