George Packer Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.

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.

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.

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.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

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.

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.

There's a tradition in war writing that the veteran goes over and sees the truth of war and comes back. And I'm skeptical of that.

Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces

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 think 'American Sniper' is anti-war. It demonstrates the agony of the decision-making that goes on.

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

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts.

The statistics of suicide show that, for non-combatants at least, life is more interesting in war than in peace.

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

I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I've been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found 'Restrepo' to be unbelievably useful.

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.

When I read the script of 'The Wall,' I saw how much different the war looks from the point of view of a soldier fighting it.

In my experience of the men of action I have met - whether from the Second World War or Iraq or Vietnam - they often had to do things that they would rather not reflect upon afterwards. This is perhaps one reason why the story of the Bielskis remained untold for so long.