Rick Atkinson Quotes

I run into a lot of kids who are either on R&R, or on their way to Iraq. They all know who I am and are fans, but they're kids! I am yet to meet one that's over 23. Yet they're full-time warriors.

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.

My younger brother is a decorated combat veteran and was a platoon leader in Iraq.

In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent.

When my father served in World War II, he wasn't told, 'Go to Europe for four months, for six months, and then you can come back, and there'll be plenty of big bases there for you to serve on, and don't worry about it.'

'The Wall' doesn't recount a specific soldier's experience in Iraq, but it captures the spirit of many experiences that were shared with me and with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and with John Cena.

I come from a service family - I met my husband Dave during my third tour in Iraq serving as a CIA analyst alongside the military.

U.S. soldiers, with whom I now have more than a passing acquaintance, joke that they track my movements in order to know where they will be deployed next.

I have spent the past ten years in just about every war zone there was.

I have been to Iraq on a number of occasions. I was with the first group that went in.

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.

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 got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

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

I think life is hard at the combat outposts, and anything that distracts us from supporting them, in my mind, is something that we shouldn't do.

I wanted to set the story straight and really let people know what it's like and what me and my Marines went through.

My eyes are wide open... you serve in Iraq, your eyes are wide open.

When you're in the military, especially if you serve, you leave in this heightened world of having adrenaline course through you, all the time. You get addicted to that because adrenaline is essentially a drug.

There are 160,000 of our men and women in Iraq that wonder whether there is going to be a hand grenade or a missile lobbed into where they are sleeping at night. Those are people who make a real sacrifice.

There are guys over in Iraq that have been there for up to 14 months. It has been really tough on them. So any support that I can give; I'll give as much as I can.

Once I was in the Blink-182, going to Iraq was really touching. It was kind of emo for me, going and meeting soldiers who were, like, 19 and hadn't even met their kids... Or dealing with depression. Just being with those soldiers and traveling with them in helicopters and people with M-16s. It was an eye-opener.

I'm guessing our soldiers are happy to be leaving Iraq. It is no fun being in a country where there's crumbling infrastructure and an ignorant population, but they said they're happy to come home anyway.

I was in the Navy and saw, first-hand, the effects of front-line combat.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.