Tracy Kidder Quotes

I'm interested in wartime stories, as I think it's important to remember what the soldiers went through.

I served two tours of duty in Vietnam. I won the Bronze Star. I won the Purple Heart.

McCain fought in Vietnam - I think that he has enough civilian blood on his hands.

My film is not a movie; it's not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.

The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

I saw some war heroes... John Kerry is not a war hero. He couldn't tie the shoes of some of the people in Coastal Division 11.

A true war story is never moral.

My father had gone to Vietnam.

'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.

Israel should not feel satisfaction at my son's death, for he died on the battlefield, facing the conquerors as he wished, with a gun in his hand.

I'm glad I never went to war.

I think about 'The Hurt Locker,' and we made a film about three guys, three different looking guys with three very different energies.

It's always been my dream to be in a war film.

Anyone who's traveled with me to Afghanistan knows why I love this book: 'War,' by Sebastian Junger.

The biggest battles in human history can only ever be seen through the eyes of the bloke on the front line, and that's by definition a very focused view and one that will vary from individual to individual.

I've grown up, luckily, with only a distant relationship to war and soldiering.

War is fear cloaked in courage.

To march over dead men, to hear without concern the groans of the wounded, I say few men can stand such scenes unless steeled by habit or fortified by military pride.

I read a lot of war literature.

Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.

'The Wall' doesn't recount a specific soldier's experience in Iraq, but it captures the spirit of many experiences that were shared with me and with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and with John Cena.