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Once An Eagle is the story of one special man, a soldier named Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a professional who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self interest. Massengale, however, brilliantly advances by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington's corridors of power.
Beginning in the French countryside during the Great War, the conflict between these adversaries solidifies in the isolated garrison life marking peacetime, intensifies in the deadly Pacific jungles of World War II, and reaches its treacherous conclusion in the last major battleground of the Cold War -- Vietnam.
A study in character and values, courage, nobility, honesty, and selflessness, here is an unforgettable story about a man who embdies the best in our nation -- and in us all.
1312 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1968
'It all seems so far away,' Celia Harrodsen said. 'Paris and Berlin. And poor little Belgium. Sam, do you honestly thing we'll get mixed up in it?'
He was swept by so many perils he felt nothing: he had moved beyond them, out of their orbit. Nothing could touch him, crouched here, snatching up cartridges, snapping the breech open smartly, lifting his hand away from the recoil. He was nothing, he was beyond everything: the gun was animate, he was the oiled and glistening machine, the servant serving. What the hell, he thought; go out this way as any other. But the thought did not penetrate beyond a certain point; it lay outside his rage, the desperate, sweating ritual he was performing.
[T:]hey were at Fort Hardee, where life was certainly real if it wasn't earnest. Sam got three cots that first day, two for the bedroom and one for the living room, and she made couch covers out of muslin she dyed a deep blue in the washtub...They painted and mended and glued and sewed; they surprised each other with their skills, evoked each other's praise. The little backyard with its sunflowers drooping in the baked earth was hopeless...