36 quotes found
“War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”
“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
“Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.”
“The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.”
“The problem with fear, though, is that it isnt any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomyanxiety, dread, panic, forebodingand you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.”
“The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one anothers lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The w...”
“Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war...”
“Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only m...”
“War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)”
“...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)”
“Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense its much more like football than, say, l...”
“The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dea...”
“I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because Ive done it so many times. First, theres a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the d...”
“Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other ha...”
“They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.”
“Today's veterans often come home to find that, although they're willing to die for their country, they're not sure how to live for it.”
“An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men".”
“The cowards fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resou...”
“How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?”
“If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.”
