John Prine Quotes

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

More soldiers died last year by their own hand than at the hands of the enemy…. More than 22 veterans commit suicide every day.

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

The military is a discrete entity. Then they come back, and they're such a small percentage of the population, and they can't really - it's hard for them to talk to civilians.

We do a very good job at fixing broken bodies but not such a great job at healing broken minds with our returning veterans.

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?'

Young men who have been away, been to war, they are different when they come home.

Much as soldiers come back, they've been in combat or the edge of it and suddenly that adjustment back to civilian life is a real challenge.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war.

That's driven by any number of factors, the most prominent of which have been the combat experience of two major campaigns - one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq - and the ongoing demands of the global war on terrorism.

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

I don't think so, but it's always in the back of my mind that many of the soldiers being wounded and killed in Iraq are about the same age as my kids. My godson is going over soon, so the war's about to get personal for me.

I think I may try and write something about my pretty extraordinary experience with the 101st in Iraq.

Bad as was being shot by some of our own troops in the battle of the Wilderness, - that was an honest mistake, one of the accidents of war, - being shot at, since the war, by many officers, was worse.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

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.

One of the greatest injustices of the Vietnam era is the way our veterans were treated when they returned home. This compounded the pain experienced by those who served. That is a mistake we must never make again.

When an army unit returns from service in Iraq or Afghanistan, it barely gets a breather before it begins training for its next deployment.

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.

Combat stress isn't the only problem for soldiers isolated in Iraq - there are family issues, re-integration issues when soldiers go home on leave, loneliness.

My grandparents were deeply affected by war, and it was obvious that the men who fought were horribly affected, as were the women who remained at home.

We need to look at how we can better fortify our force protection at military installations. But also, how can we deal with these mental health issues with our returning veterans? And our suicide rate in the military is twice as high as the average population.