War Experience Quotes

When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. ... Countless minor incidents - the kind you can never really foresee - combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

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.

My generals are always right about other people’s wars and wrong about our own.

I had no desire to go to Iraq. I never wanted to go to Mosul. I'm not a war correspondent. No part of me thrives on the adrenaline or anything like that.

I have found in my experience of war, that plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.

Changi for me - of course it's easy to be wise after the event, and to discuss it cleverly after the event - was about as near as you can get to being dead and still be alive.

When the Second World War finished, I was 23, and already I had seen enough horror to last me a lifetime. I'd seen dreadful, dreadful things, without saying a word. So seeing horror depicted on film doesn't affect me much.

I was a lieutenant in World War II.

Both grandfathers fought in different wars. My mother's father fought in World War II, and then my father's father fought in Korea. And they're both these country boys, one from rural Tennessee and one from rural Louisiana - and they never went back home.

Both of my grandfathers served in World War II, both in the Pacific. One wouldn't talk about it, and one would.

Unless war is made something real for the Englishman in his own country, this robber and murderer will not recognize what it means for other people. Since the forces of [Dutch 17th century Admiral] de Ruyter, nobody has exploded a single bomb on England’s doorstep.

'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.

I'm a military kid, both parents in the military - Mom did 12 years, Dad did 21, served in two wars. So discipline is something that was huge.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

The biggest problem was the politicians knew nothing about fighting a war.

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.

Leading the coalition military effort during the surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 was the most important endeavor - and greatest challenge - of my 37 years in uniform.

War is a drug…. Maybe the supreme drug of human existence…. It creates a landscape that is almost beyond human imagination…. You have that adrenalin rush….

The PoWs went through something so horrible, you don't know who's coming back.

There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.

I served my country; I did that. I was in the C.I.A., and I served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I love this country with every part of my body, and I was willing to risk my body and my family for it. But I wake up in a country I don't understand anymore.

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.