“Yes, the issue was courage. It
always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it.
Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he
almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage.
It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked
winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing
the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in
the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue.
The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of
figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret
chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for
all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He
believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a
biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that
might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or
a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor
that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if
ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a
Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.”
―
Tim
O'Brien