"Yeah, it's important." For just a moment, before he fights it back, he feels an ache behind his eyes, a prickling sting. Because his men--some of them just boys, all of them friends and brothers, and it's hard to even think of leaving them. In Iraq, in Kuwait, he had led a fireteam and he had led them as well as he could, and he had taken care of them when they needed taking care of and had screamed at them when they had needed that too, and when three of them had died he had wept over them, and he had written three of the hardest letters he's ever had to write.

The other hard letters he's written, he's decided that no one will ever see.

He blinks hard, shakes his head. "But it's not all I do."