The Enemy Quotes
"You just drop dead, is what they should say."
"A minute. One down, one to go. Sixty more seconds."
"Death rate in America is around 865 people per 100,000 population per year."
"Do the math with the death rate versus current strength, and you have twenty-two dead soldiers every single day of every single year."
"So were the sergeants. This one was a mountain woman from north Georgia."
"The Berlin Wall is halfway down. They showed it on the television. They were having a big party out there."
"We won," I said. "Isn't that supposed to be a good thing?"
"I got orders," I said. "Not my place to ask."
"Not at first. Then he said it was because he heard a vehicle leaving in a hurry."
"He said it was a big engine, revving hard, taking off fast, like a panic situation."
"The kid says the vehicle had a very distinctive sound. Very loud. And diesel, not gasoline."
"Unhelpful people often do. They’re not trying to please you. They’re not trying to impress you."
"People do stuff like that, in a place like this. They set the room on fire. And then high-tail out."
"If they’re in my chain of command," I said. "You’re not."
"I can’t tell you that," I said. "It’s germane to an ongoing inquiry."
"It was around here somewhere," he said. "That much is already common knowledge."
"Bird’s not a small post," he said. "But it’s not real big, either, right?"
"Right now? Some two-star died and I can’t find his briefcase."
"I got orders," I said. "You know how it is. You have to assume they know what they’re doing."
"You should find out. Find out who wanted you at Bird badly enough to pull you out of Panama and replace you with an asshole."
"Don’t you salute senior officers when you enter a room?"
"Look it up," I said. "I’m with the 110th Special Unit. We’re separate."
"So why are you here? It’s kind of late for a social visit."
"Ask away," I said. "Then I’ll ask some of my own."
"I’ll be answering out of courtesy," I said. "You’ll be answering because the Uniform Code of Military Justice requires you to."
"We’re aware of that. We’d like to know the circumstances."
"The army is a family. We're all on the same side."
"I'm an investigator. I have to ask questions."
"The world is changing. I had always been a loner, but at that point I started to feel lonely."
"If he'd been alive when they cut him, it would have been running like a river."
"We're looking for women who knew Kramer, and who have permanent access to Humvees, and who were off post on New Year's Eve, and who were at dinner last night."
"He took himself, a K-bar, a blunt instrument, and yogurt."
"I'm trying to see the point of this extraordinary visit."
"A man needs to be obeyed. Like it says in the Bible."
"Bear in mind most of us don’t drive as fast as you do."
"It’s a beautiful car. I wash it twice a week."
"You think I had something to do with Carbone and Brubaker?"
"Focus on the weapon. Forget everything else."
"No way was Willard about to authorize any foreign expeditions."
"You should think about your next promotion board."
"Bound to be sooner than we think. And than we want."
"Every time the phone company dug a trench for a cable, they found skulls and bones."
"Major Marshall went to California. Emergency deployment to Fort Irwin."
"The twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street."
"You don’t take a taxi on a trip where you break into a hardware store and a house."
"We could have done without it. But I wasn’t surprised to be hit with it."
"We should be looking for his car somewhere up there."
"But it won’t always need clueless assholes like you."
"We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split."
"The Cold War battlefields are literally set in stone, Reacher."
"Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time."
"We’re going to be chased around the world by BOLO messages."
"We’re out of the world for forty-eight hours. Let’s enjoy ourselves."
"I like her fine. But, you know, nobody lives forever."
"Things happen in order to dead-end other things."
"To fail to take the battle to the enemy when your back is to the wall is to perish."
"While coolness in disaster is the supreme proof of a commander’s courage, energy in pursuit is the surest test of his strength of will."
"Nobody ever accepts that fact. Nobody ever has, and nobody ever will."
"The collapse of Soviet communism was bound to lead to stresses inside the U.S. military."
"The internal plotting and planning was bound to be anticipated and steps were bound to be taken to nip potential trouble in the bud."
"Everything is going to change, major. There will be no stone unturned."
"Technically it was a conspiracy. Legally they all share the blame."
"This case was like a wave on the beach, like a big old roller that washes in and races up the sand, and pauses, and then washes back out and recedes, leaving nothing behind."
"Except it did leave something behind. It left a big ugly piece of flotsam stuck right there on the waterline, and we have to address it."
"The complaint is true. The complaint is accurate. In every detail. It went down exactly like Carbone described."
"I never went back to Fort Bird. Never saw that sergeant again, the one with the baby son."
"I was in the army, and I was always where someone else told me to be."