We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.
Let's see if we can't get this war behind us now. Certainly, the man in the street, the common person there, wants to have this war behind him. I think a lot of the soldiers are very war-weary too.
I think, though, that another shame of war is that when it’s over, a soldier don’t get to leave it behind where he fought it. He’s gotta carry it right back home with him, in his head, and in his heart.
The bacteriologist, often risking his life to find cures for lethal afflictions, was another kind of imperial hero, as brave in his way as the soldier-explorer.
Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin' shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.
I'm brilliant as well as skilled," he said modestly. "It's a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can.
As I remember his laugh, there was nothing mad about it, it was more like the laugh of someone who has been the victim of a practical joke, a farce in which he had believed until suddenly he realized his folly.
A day came when I should have died, and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don't wake up forever.
War does not only kill soldiers and warriors. It also kills rules and moral values. No! Those cannot be killed. War kills the pretense at rules and moral values. It also kills the pretense of being human beings...
The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked
You can’t live your life in a bubble, Charlie. And you can’t live Evan’s life for him. He won’t thank you if you try to wrap him in bubble wrap and set him on a shelf.
I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
For real men serve their country with random acts of kindness, not vicious acts of violence. And real soldiers have one duty, and one duty only; they have a duty to mutiny!
One-year enlistment had proven problematic since the troops were scheduled to rotate out of the army just when they had begun to internalize the discipline of military service and became reliable soldiers.
Troops are everywhere in their modern, digital camouflage, designed to blend in anywhere at any time. Yet at night we wear bright yellow reflective belts.
The good citizen when he opens his door in the evening must be banker, golfer, husband, father; not a nomad wandering the desert, a mystic staring at the sky, a debauchee in the slums of San Francisco, a soldier heading a revolution, a pariah howling...
An Army wife is probably the only woman in the world who knows and readily accepts that she is the mistress, because, let’s face it, the Army is the wife and the wife gets all the damn attention!
If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organized resistance." "Eh?" said Syme, staring. "The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.
Sometimes I closed my eyes hard to avoid thinking, but the eye of the mind refused to be closed and continued to plague me with images.
