“When the coffee is first-rate, so is everything else. All right, let's go fight a war.”
Andrew Waltfeld Quotes
2 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“The first time I actually ever had to shoot somebody, it turned my stomach. They told me I'd get used to it in time. And after a while, that's what happened.”
Waltfeld is preparing to board the Eternal for the last battle, with one arm and one eye left from his fight with Kira in the desert, and this is the closest SEED comes to a veteran's confession. The flatness is the achievement. He does not say getting used to it was wrong; he says it happened, which is a much harder thing to hear from a character the show has made likeable. Set it beside Mu's speech to Kira in episode thirty, that soldiers are not murderers, and the contrast is the series' whole position on adults: Mu offers the boy a distinction, Waltfeld offers him a prognosis. The Tiger has no advice and no philosophy in this scene, only a description of what the job does to a person who does it well, delivered by a man about to go and do it again.
Read Andrew Waltfeld's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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The Desert Tiger is introduced with a cup of coffee and a lecture about the Archangel's manuals, and this is the sentence that tells a viewer what kind of villain he is going to be: a professional who has arranged his life so that the war is a thing he goes to, like an office. Half the ZAFT officers in SEED are ideologues or careerists. Waltfeld is the first enemy Kira meets who plainly likes his work and dislikes the war, and the show uses him to make the strange point that competence can be a form of decency. Two episodes later he is telling Kira that people who say they would rather die are usually lying, and by episode forty-two he has switched sides. The coffee is not a quirk. It is the sign of a man who has kept something for himself, and the series treats that as the reason he survives with his judgment intact when almost no one else on his side does.