This quote comes from the Spartan Warrior Dienekes. I got this from Danny White when he was coaching with the Utah Blaze. It was on the wall in their locker room.
Nothing fires the warriors heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one’s own bowls or guts but from one’s own discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which are the supreme accomplishments of the warrior: to perform the common place under far from commonplace conditions.
Not only to achieve this for one’s self alone but to do it as part of a unit, to feel one’s brothers in arms filling the spaces along side him, not in a frenzy of mad possession driven abandon, but with order and self composure. Each man knowing his role and rising to it. The warrior in these moments finds himself lifted as if by the hand of God. In that moment the phalanx forms a unity so dense and all divining that it performs not merely at the level of a machine or engine of war, but surpassing that, to the state of a single organism, a beast of one blood and one heart.
