Soldier Experience Quotes

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can.

When I deployed to Iraq with my fellow soldiers, putting our lives on the line for our country, no one in the media questioned our patriotism because of our religion.

While a guy at home is sweating over his income tax and Victory garden, a dogface somewhere is getting great joy out of wiggling his little finger. He does it just to see it move and to prove to himself that he is still alive and able to move it.

The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.

You'd have to put yourself back in the 1960s to understand how separate from the mainstream of American life soldiers felt themselves to be, because we knew that students and others were demonstrating pretty violently against what we were doing.

I went to Vietnam, and I was there for a long time. [Using marijuana] made the difference between staying human or, as Michael Douglas said, becoming a beast.

I was largely drinking to forget where I was. When you’re in a place like Vietnam, you get to a point where you don’t care any more. You’re in a place that’s foreign to you, and you know for a fact that many people there hate you and will kill you if they get the chance. It really does something to your mind to know that many of the people living around you don’t like you and want you to die.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.

Often times the best military leaders were soldiers.

When I read the script of 'The Wall,' I saw how much different the war looks from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

It's important for Americans to know what the guys fighting the wars have been experiencing, not just from the perspective of a talking-head politician or a four-star general.

There's nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: "The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it.

I think it's a stereotype that soldiers don't talk, because my experience is that they will talk if they are met with empathy and no judgment.

Angry men with pointy things sent to secure a foreign city are pretty much alike anywhere. That's what I've heard. So far nothing's convinced me different.

My father fought on the side of the Central Powers, as a soldier in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Army, my maternal grandfather fought in the British Army, on different sides, and both were so traumatized by the experience that they never talked about it.

The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.

Young men who have been away, been to war, they are different when they come home.

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.

I know what soldiers or their families go through.

Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home.