James McCloughan Quotes

Blood and death. That moves me.

The battalion, the whole battalion was affected by the two killed just within a week of being there, and I think that that pulled everybody up to make them realise that this was a very serious business.

It’s very hard really to look a soldier in the eye when you fear that you are sending him to his death.

I held 18, 19, or 20-year-old men in my arms, and I heard their last words, and I saw them take their last breath.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

In war, everything changes. You are very selective of what you do because everything you do can be the last thing you do in your life.

Death, whether it regards ourselves or others, appears less terrible in war than at home. The cries of women and children, friends in anguish, a dark room, dim tapers, priests and physicians, are what affect us the most on the death-bed. Behold us already more than half dead and buried.

Men, today we die a little.

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.

Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

Death is something that happens to others, you think, until it happens to you.

I don't want to hear about my death.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

And the blood of brave men was shed like unto the shedding of rain from a black cloud.

Through this same man and me hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is my most noble lord slain.

I have always done my duty. I am ready to die. My only regret is for the friends I leave behind me.

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

Death is not something any one of us want to dwell on, but we must all confront it at some point.