Surely mankind has yet to be born. Surely this is true! For only something blind and uncomprehending could exist in such a mean conjunction with its … - William Styron

For General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, military life may be symbolized by "beacons flashing across uncharted depths . . . faint bugles sounding reveille," but for many if not most of his countrymen it is something else: it is reveille. It is training manuals and twenty-mile hikes, stupefying lectures on platoon tactics and terrain and the use of the Lister bag, mountains of administrative paperwork, compulsive neatness and hideous barracks in Missouri and Texas, sexual deprivation, hot asphalt drill fields and deafening rifle ranges, daily tedium unparalleled in its ferocity, awful food, bad pay, ignorant people and a ritualistic demand for ass-kissing almost unique in the quality of its humiliation. The world that MacArthur thrills to makes most of his fellow Americans choke with horror.

I had now reached that phase of the disorder where all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity; my brain, in thrall to its outlaw hormones, had become less an organ of thought than an instrument registering, minute by minute, varying degrees of its own suffering.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.