Sebastian Junger Quotes

The battalion, the whole battalion was affected by the two killed just within a week of being there, and I think that that pulled everybody up to make them realise that this was a very serious business.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.

Everyone knows what can happen to soldiers who are in front line units.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

I feel like it's big now with the passing of Mac Miller. Rest in peace, Mac Miller, who was a good friend of mine. That just showed people, like, it could happen to anybody. Just because you have fame or money, you're not immune to negativity and depression and stress.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

In those days I learned that nothing is more frightening than a hero who lives to tell his story, to tell what all those who fell at his side will never be able to tell.

The essence of war is insanity. Destruction, death, women widowed, children orphaned, lands plundered, property destroyed, lives decimated - it's all bad.

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

The one thing all that battle taught me, is that no one walks away without scars. No one. (Bad Moon Rising)

Ben Battle was a soldier bold, and used to war's alarms, But a cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms.

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

We are all the walking wounded in a world that is a war zone. Everything we love will be taken from us, everything, last of all life itself. Yet everywhere I look, I find great beauty in this battlefield, and grace and the promise of joy.

How many more times do we have to come to terms with death before we find safety?" he asked. He waited a few minutes, but the three of us didn't say anything. He continued: "Every time people come at us with the intention of killing us, I close my eyes and wait for death. Even though I am still alive, I feel like each time I accept death, part of me dies. Very soon I will completely die and all that will be left is my empty body walking with you. It will be quieter than I am.

Death, whether it regards ourselves or others, appears less terrible in war than at home. The cries of women and children, friends in anguish, a dark room, dim tapers, priests and physicians, are what affect us the most on the death-bed. Behold us already more than half dead and buried.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

As they croak, I see myself in the pistol smoke.

The doll, Dallas. You know, Barbie doll. Jeez, didn't you ever have dollies?" "Dolls are like small dead people. I have enough dead people, thanks.

... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.

And wonder, dread and war have lingered in that land where loss and love in turn have held the upper hand.

I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.

In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken against their will.

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.