Clancy has such a gift for taking multiple seemingly-unrelated storylines and piecing them all together seamlessly in the end. He confronts the ugliest atrocities of our world and hits them head-on with right, justice and reality.
Without Remorse is another beautifully crafted tale of bravery, commitment to a cause and fearlessness in the face of the worst odds.
My favorite quotes:
"When you dealt with explosives, you didn't rush and you didn't take chances." 12
"...there was more than one hell, and he hadn't seen them all quite yet." 17
"It was hard not having a soul, most especially when you could remember having one." 20
"Loneliness didn't tell you what you had lost, only that something was missing." 29
"Time was something that filled the empty spaces in your life...." 165
"...good enough was good enough, while perfect was always a pain in the ass and often not worth the effort anyway." 178
"A powerful force, grief. There were advantages in having enemies you could seek out and eliminate. Fighting a shadow was far more difficult." 196
"'Maybe we're all trying to save the world, Sandy, one little bit at a time.'" 198
"Song Tay was the whole story of Vietnam, told in the few minutes it had taken for a superbly-trained team to fail, betrayed as much by process as by some misguided or traitorous person hidden in the federal bureaucracy." 212
"This was not a night for emotion. Emotion was what had given him the mission. How he accomplished it had to come from something else." 214
"The Corps operated according to a plan that no man really figured out...." 227
"'...it's not what you fight against. It's what you fight for.'" 259
"Such thoughts were like minefields. You wandered into them, innocent, expecting nothing, then found out too late that there was danger. It would be better not to remember, Kelly thought. I'd really be better off that way. But if without memories, good and bad, what was life, and if you forgot those who mattered to you, then what did you become? And if you didn't act on those memories, what value did life have?" 284
"Time stopped for Billy and became eternity. There was no light, no darkness, no sound or silence. All of reality was pain." 337
"...there was more to life than fear. ... Life had to have a purpose, and one such purpose was the service of others." 388