Joe's First Line is Great

I love cataloging first lines (see here and here) and I'm really looking forward to this next book, have been for some time now (see here and here), so I'm glad that The Forever War starts with such an intriguing first line:

‘Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant. 

I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

Haldeman, Joe - The Forever War

This reminds me of a shirt I almost bought. It said "I may look calm, but in my head I've killed you three times" (see here). When I told my wife about it she yelled that it was perfect for me. Whether due to my time in the military or thanks to my liking to write murder mysteries, I'm always thinking about how to kill people.

I'm glad to see that the character in my next book seems to think the same way.