"He’d always been glad he wasn’t an infantryman: if you were a mudfoot, war, and the death and the maiming that went with war, were random and impersonal. What had he just been doing but dealing out random, impersonal death? He thought of himself as a knight in shining armor. What sorts of filthy things had knights done that never got into the pages of Malory and Ivanhoe? He didn’t know. He didn’t want to find out, not really. He looked down at himself. His imaginary suit of armor seemed to have a patch or two of rust on it. No matter who you were or what you did, you couldn’t stay immaculate, not in this war."