37 quotes found
“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...”
“Women shouldn't be in combat," said Vorkosigan, grimly glum. "Neither should men, in my opinion.”
“I do not believe in using women in combat, because females are too fierce.”
“War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. Y...”
“I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.”
“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...”
“Aside from clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, I have not met one person in war who thoroughly enjoyed killing. If someone ended up bragging over a kill, it was safe to assume that their story was me...”
“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...”
“War comes home invades it, literally and every day is another combat. Only, theres nothing available, nothing real to fight. And you never know when the next attack will come, only from whom it wil...”
“Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan Id been on combat missions. 217 days. And Im still paying the price for every one of those days.”
“You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never kno...”
“An open mind, is the best weapon, in the fight between light and darkness”
“Fighting physically signifies spiritual weakness.”
“Today, more than 23 million veterans walk among us. Nearly 3 million receive disability compensation, and many more owe their lives to an anonymous corpsman or medic. Millions of Americans and thei...”
“This is a Spartacan fighting knife. Heard of the Spartacan Scouts? Rough boys. This knife belonged to one of them. He died saving my life.”
“Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, t...”
“I miss it: the smell of sand, sweat, and gunpowder, rings of salt from dried sweat on my pants legs, and around my waist just under where my armor sits.”
“Armon stared into the wild darkness of his opponent and saw a reflection of his own fall.”
“For those regarded as warriors...When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warriors only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, ...”
“Caroline, beside herself, dragged me down to her, her breast was against mine, and by a circular movement seemed to caress it. The pretty strawberries which crowned her breasts, jealous at meeting ...”