Combat Zone Quotes

Destroyers were the first to herald our entrance into the war.

If a person is a U.S. citizen, and he is on the battlefield in Afghanistan or Iraq trying to attack our troops, he will face the full brunt of the U.S. military response.

I always like it at a war. There is always the chance that you will get up the next morning and be killed and not have to write.

I have a pretty amazing life. Even back-to-back deployments - Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey - it's still pretty rewarding.

My husband is exceedingly busy. For some time the talk of his going had been slack, but just now again there seems to be a move to get him sent to the front!

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

I have never been embedded with the American army or, you know, with the big war machine.

I am a military police officer and I have served on two deployments; my first was to Iraq, in a medical unit, and my second deployment was to Kuwait, as a military police platoon leader.

I had known Colonel Charlie Flynn since he was a lieutenant 23 years earlier, and I remembered how his first child, Molly, had been born while Charlie was deployed to the first Gulf War.

I come from a service family - I met my husband Dave during my third tour in Iraq serving as a CIA analyst alongside the military.

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

I spent two and a half years in the Philippines in World War II.

I was a grunt, walking around in the jungle of Vietnam, trying not to find the enemy. Because I am so big, they were going to give me either a heavy radio or a huge machine gun to carry. I carried a radio.

My wife volunteered her services as Red Cross nurse, insisting upon being sent to the front, in order to be as near me as could be, but it developed later that no nurse was allowed to go farther than the large troop hospitals far in the rear of the actual operations.

My time in war zones have been fleeting and infrequent. I've been to Iraq. I've been to Afghanistan. I've been to other places where I've collected hazardous duty pay.

What's always got me is the fact that when people talked on the telly about Iraq, before Afghanistan kicked off, you'd get only these public-school-type army officers talking about what was going on out there. I kept thinking, 'Why don't we get the true voice of the squaddie? Why don't we hear from the lads on the battlefield?'

I had a job; I was, during the war, a nurse, a 'Gray Lady.' We wore a veil and a gray dress.

You don't deploy forces into harm's way without knowing what's going on.

The number of medals on an officer's breast varies in inverse proportion to the square of the distance of his duties from the front line.

We cannot continue to ask the brave men and women of our Armed Forces to put their lives on the line to protect our country while we jeopardize their safety by failing to ensure that Defense Department funds are not siphoned off to warlords in Afghanistan.

My eyes are wide open... you serve in Iraq, your eyes are wide open.

When I was deployed, I could feel a full spectrum of American power keeping me safe. And yes, that was the armor on my vehicle; yes, it was the armor on my body; but it was also the armor of some level of American moral authority.

I have been to Iraq on a number of occasions. I was with the first group that went in.

I've lived most of my life in Manhattan, but I lived in Brooklyn for a while as a kid. I went to junior high school there. Girls in Brooklyn have to be tough - I mean real tough - just to get by. It's life in the combat zone.

We have crushed the whole force which dared to venture there. They were on the runway at Saddam International Airport. That force was crushed