John Sandford Quotes

When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.

I understood that 'The Yellow Birds' would be a peculiar representation of the experience of being at war. I intended it to be so.

If you are a real soldier, you never get over the war.

I think sometimes you go through an experience, and you don't feel the impact, especially in a war experience, until way past it.

I did not know that the wounds of war are often invisible.

'Shortly Thereafter' chronicles all the aspects of an Afghanistan deployment, from the terrors of the unknown that await before leaving, to the perverse thrills and adrenaline rushes found in combat, to the return home to a land and a people now more foreign than the war itself was.

It's very strange getting out of the military, when you've lived in Iraq, and people you know are going overseas again and again. Some of them are getting injured.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

You're in a combat zone one day. You come home, and then you have to readjust, and it takes a few days. We just sit in the house, hang with the family and then things get better.

We are at war, and it's ongoing, and there's no end in sight. More and more guys are coming back from it, and the transition back to civilian life is almost too big a mountain to climb.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire.

As we began to read more and more journals of men who had been in the Civil War and then been in the Indian Wars, we realized there was a whole universe of men whose souls had been shattered, whose lives had been utterly destroyed by what they had to do.

What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder, 'What's next for me?' and they ask themselves, 'Why did this happen to me?'

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

I had been out there long enough. I had not seen my family for four years.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they've been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.

Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads.

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.

I'd dropped out of high school without really doing it on purpose - I'd just go home at lunch 'cos I didn't have friends, then stay there all afternoon listening to rap. It got to the point where I wouldn't have passed even if I'd gone back. I was depressed, basically.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

We all have times when we go home at night and pull out our hair and feel misunderstood and lonely and like we're falling. I think the brain is such that there is always going to be something missing.

No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.

I felt we really couldn't be separated that much. I'd had a baby, and I was traveling and working alone while he was in the Army. It was very difficult-the phone calls and all of that. I really was very depressed.