Combat Trauma Quotes

Post-traumatic stress, that's why the soldiers need marijuana, is for their mental health. It makes them feel better so that they don't have the horrors of war in their mind all the time. And the government won't allow them to have it, because it's illegal - federally. It's absurd.

I saw a great many men die afterwards, some suffering horribly, but I do not recall any death that affected me quite so much as that of this first victim in my platoon.

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise, we would never have won.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

My body was torn apart by an enemy hand grenade... upon arriving at Camp Bastion, I was labeled P.E.A. - patient expired on arrival. I flat-lined at Walter Reed.

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts.

Women have long found themselves grieving for the dead and caring for the wounded during and after war, but … as more and more women become war fighters themselves, they too face danger and see horrors, often with the added burden if sexual harassment and worse at the hands of their fellow warriors—burdens aggravated by official indifference.

I'm a soldier who didn't know how nasty the battle was going to be, and now, I've got a purple heart and I'm back.

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

I believe the connection is growing stronger. Just to think that 40-plus years ago, service members would return from combat to get spit on by so many civilians. Regardless of what we think about a conflict, we must always honor and be grateful for those men and women who serve.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire.

Ben Battle was a soldier bold, and used to war's alarms, But a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

When you talk to people who have been in combat, there's a sensory overload that happens. The color becomes vivid. Sounds become more pronounced. People talk about how, for them, the war was technicolor and real life was black and white after the war.

Often, warriors find their lives meaningless.

When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.

In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn't happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an American army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.

The greatest heroes of the Normandy battlefield were the unarmed medics, whom snipers often shot at despite their Red Cross armbands.

Helpless, tortured, shot, blown up, my best buddies all dead, and all because we were afraid of the liberals back home, afraid to do what was necessary to save our own lives. Afraid of American civilian lawyers. I have only one piece of advice for what it's worth: If you don't want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,Raged at his breast, gulped and died,Do not weep.War is kind.

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.