When Europeans feel sufficiently provoked and threatened–a few serious terrorist attacks could do it–Europe's Muslims will be lucky just to be deport… - Ralph Peters

Faced with opponents who sacrifice the innocent to their god, our generals study atheist guerrillas. To cope with fanatical killers with global ambitions, we turn to courts of law intended for common criminals. Pirates terrorize shipping lanes, while we wring our hands over their legal status. And all parties on the Potomac still insist that stability can be assured by supporting tyrants and that infernally corrupt governments are bound to reform if only we treat them respectfully. We mouth admirable principles for which we won't lift a finger. If we must be hypocrites, we should at least apply some intelligence to the task.

When I mentioned my decision to retire, it surprised everyone. The immediate advice from peers was that I should stay on for at least two years from the date of my promotion, since that was the minimum period of service-in-grade required, with a waiver, to qualify for a lieutenant-colonel's retirement pay. It showed how little they knew me: the notion that I would hang on for an additional year, counting down the days, just to collect a few hundred dollars more each month offended me. For the rest of my life, I'll be paid as a retired major, and I have never wished it otherwise.
The Army was good to me even then, and the chain of command asked what it would take to make me change my mind and stay in uniform. I didn't even consider the offer. Once you make up your mind on so weighty an issue, you stick by your decision. And had I said, "Oh, assign me to X and I'll hang around," it would have seemed as if the whole fuss had been a bit of theater to get whatever I wanted. I had always served with dignity, if sometimes obstreperously, and I intended to leave on my own terms.
Three and a half years later, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I did regret retiring from the Army. But my fate lay elsewhere.

They moved up between black trees, trip-me stumps, and small boulders. Everything in this world seemed disordered, messed up. Crazy people. Who started all this. For what? The nuclear blast hadn't reached his hood in East L.A. But the radiation did. He'd been on Okinawa. His family had been home. Now the Jihadis were going to get their shit handed to them.