Life & Wisdom Quote by David Eddings

War is often sold as strategy and glory, but Eddings frames it as a blunt administrative handoff: here is a pile of lives, do your best. The line’s power comes from how casually the system delegates the unbearable. “When they ran out of cadre men” is logistical, almost bored with itself; it implies a machine chewing through qualified leadership so fast it starts improvising. Authority doesn’t descend with ceremony, it arrives as a staffing shortage.

Then the gut-punch: “my very own platoon.” The phrasing has the faint echo of a prize, the kind of language we associate with ownership or promotion. Eddings lets that irony hang. What you “get” in war isn’t status, it’s responsibility measured in bodies. The quoted order - “Here are 63 men…” - is brutally specific, reducing human beings to a headcount while also making their individuality unavoidable. Sixty-three is too exact to feel abstract; you can imagine faces, names, the awkward weight of remembering them.

The mission statement isn’t to win, or even to fight, but to “keep as many of them alive as you possibly can.” That clause smuggles in war’s dirty realism: some will die, and everyone knows it. The subtext is moral injury before the term existed - the knowledge that competence will be judged by survival rates, and that luck will masquerade as leadership.

Calling it “one of the more harrowing experiences” is restrained, which is its own kind of honesty. He doesn’t perform trauma; he points to the moment the war stopped being an idea and became a ledger with his signature on it.