"Peckinpah knew only too well, from his time in the Marine Corps, the many paradoxes of the professional soldier. He too felt a dark atraction for life at the edge of disaster, for it was here that one experienced life at its most extreme, that one lived most intensely. He couldn't help but admire men who rode to they doom with such panache, characters who, as he wrote in his master's thesis, meet their fate with courage and dignity"

(If they move kill them. The life and times of Sam Peckinpah, David Waddle)