Combat Missions Quotes

One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.

My dad was a fighter pilot with the 210th Combat Aviation in Vietnam.

I've been a paratrooper all my life.

I never dreamed to be a fighter pilot, because those guys are jerks.

I was happy to be in Afghanistan, doing these real-world operations and taking the fight to the terrorists that attacked us.

I was sent to Korea, which was excellent training for what came later. I was assigned to remain on duty until I completed one hundred combat missions - or got knocked out - whichever came first.

We know about bad guys, what they do, and often, who they are. The politicians have chosen to send us into battle, and that's our trade. We do what's necessary. And in my view, once those politicians have elected to send us out to do what 99.9 percent of the country would be terrified to undertake, they should get the hell out of the way and stay there.

I flew a full string of 35 combat missions over some of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. We were hitting Hitler's oil refineries, his tank factories, his aircraft factories, his railway yards. Those were our prime targets.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'

Spartan is about this elite unit of the armed forces named the Delta Force. I play a protege of Val Kilmer's character, and he kind of gives me a hard time.

And across Afghanistan, every single day, Afghan soldiers, Afghan police and ISAF troops are serving shoulder-to-shoulder in some very difficult situations. And our engagement with them, our shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with them, our conduct of operations with them every single day defines the real relationship.

I was put in the Air Corps. I was never educated to serve in the military, but soon my activities in the American Air Corps became very interesting to me.

I went into the Air Corps from 1943 through 1945.

I flew helicopters, and I loved flying helicopters on the East Coast when I did a couple of deployments out to the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive.

So here's what I want you to know, and here's what I want all our men and women in uniform to know: Because of you, we are ending these wars in a way that will make America stronger and the world more secure. Because of you.

The boyfriend of the student music teacher came in: "Hey, kids, this is a real Air Force pilot." I asked him something to the effect of how it felt to be dropping bombs on children in Vietnamese villages. And it got very icy in there all of a sudden, and finally the teacher said, "Oh, well, Eric reads a lot of newspapers. Next question."

We have had some bad incidents and there continue to be allegations of others which will be investigated; but overwhelmingly American forces there, putting their lives on the line every day, protecting Iraqis, helping to liberate them, that is appreciated by the Iraqi people and by the Prime Minister.

For Dad, service took him many unexpected places. It summoned him and his crew mates to the skies over the Pacific Ocean in World War II. It took him to Capitol Hill, Beijing and eventually the Oval Office.

You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

In 2001, I was an Air Force lieutenant colonel and A-10 fighter pilot stationed in Saudi Arabia, in charge of rescue operations for no-fly enforcement in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

I ended up in the Army Air Corps in the Pacific, operating out of Ayuka field in Hawaii.

I had volunteered for the Air Force and was an enthusiastic bombardier. While dropping bombs on Europe, I generally didn't understand what I was doing.

All of the military services - land, sea, and air - spend a great deal of time awake. This is a direct result of the high tempo of operations we conduct while forward deployed well outside our national borders.