Hanoi Hannah Quotes

Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.

By day certainly the combatants have a clearer notion, though even then by no means of all that takes place, no one knowing much of anything that does not does not go on in his own immediate neighborhood; but in a night engagement ( and this was the only one that occurred between great armies during the war) how could anyone know anything for certain?

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

The military mind always imagines that the next war will be on the same lines as the last.

As a combat medic, I heard a lot of last words; I saw a lot of last breaths taken.

What do I care about danger? I've sent soldiers and airmen to death against the enemy - why should I be afraid?

We've all been a little confused this past week, because our dearly beloved Westertoren bells have been carted off to be melted down for the war, so we have no idea of the exact time, either night or day.

Vonnegut's war was necessary. And yet it was massacre and screaming and confusion and blood and death. It was the mammoth projection outward of the confused inner life of men. In war, the sad tidy constructs we make to help us believe life is orderly and controllable are roughly thrown aside like the delusions they are. In war, love is outed as an insane, insupportable emotion, a kind of luxury emotion, because everywhere you look, someone beloved to someone is being slaughtered, by someone whose own beloved has been slaughtered, or will be, or could be.

Whenever armed forces . . . are used, the idea of combat must be present. . . . The end for which a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained, the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking, and marching is simply that he should fight at the right place and the right time.

Maybe a president who didn't believe our soldiers were going to heaven might be a little less willing to get them killed.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

To have good soldiers, a nation must always be at war.

In Defense of the World Order . . . U.S. soldiers would have to kill and die.

To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money." (On Vietnam War)

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself. In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final . Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.

When they remain in garrison, soldiers are maintained with fear and punishment; when they are then led to war, with hope and reward.

Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total.

You go back and look at things like Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, a lot of people dying in state-sponsored arm conflict

Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.

Most people die in improvised circumstances of harassment and confusion, whether in hospital or out of it.

It's important to listen to the words of the enemy if you're in war.