Elliot Ackerman Quotes

I think there's a tremendous split between people who've been through a war and people who haven't.

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.

A man who's never seen war is like a woman who's never given birth - soft in the head.

I am a member of the Peace Society because I was a soldier: because I have fought and seen what war is like from personal experience. It was on the battlefield that I pledged myself to the cause of peace.

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

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

I proudly served in the United States Army during the Korean War as an artillery operations specialist in the all-black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion in the Second Infantry Division.

I did frequently refer to my war record in World War II, but not in any flamboyant way.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

We've been at war for 10 years with this generation of Marines. We've seen women do a whole lot of things between the war in Iraq and the current war in Afghanistan. The fact that I'm sitting here making sure that we continue to put out the best young Marines is just a matter of it being 2011.

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

My own grandfathers were a submarine commander and a 'desert rats' tank operator in the Second World War.

My father and all my uncles on both sides served in the military in World War II and Korea.

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.

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 think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

Of course I would never compare myself to someone who actually went through a war, but I definitely matured shooting 'The Pacific.' I'm more calm and I have more patience.

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

'Catch-22''s first readers were largely of the generation that went through World War II. For them, it provided a startlingly fresh take, a much-needed, much-delayed laugh at the terror and madness they endured.

If Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and George W. Bush had ever been in combat themselves, they might not have sent troops to Iraq.

I feel that I am nine years old, seven and a half years in the Afghan Jihad, one and a half years in Jihad in Palestine and the rest of the years have no value.

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.

Leading the coalition military effort during the surge in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 was the most important endeavor - and greatest challenge - of my 37 years in uniform.

In the early 2009, a campaign plan developed by Petraeus and General McChrystal to defeat the Taliban, they required a minimum force of 40,000. President Obama rejected that recommendation and provided 25 percent less. He also decided he would pull the force out in 12 to 15 months.