Mel Brooks Quotes

Corps of Sappers and Miners

We were the group that built the roads by day that the Vietcong traveled at night.

My fascination with war is because my dad was in World War II, and my brother was in Vietnam.

The day after high school, I was off to basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Station. You gotta understand, we didn't care about sports. We wanted to win the war. We wanted to win the war! And at the time, we didn't know if we would.

Bridges represent archetypal problems. They are artifacts that bring you across or around an obstacle. So they have an unbelievable force.

People always assume I was in a motorcycle wreck. My response to them: no, Taliban.

The thing that strikes a chord with me... as a mother... is to think of my 17-year-old son fighting would be just terrifying.

When you're going off to Iraq, your horizons become more short term.

I didn't see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.

In 2012, I got hit by an IED in Afghanistan.

My father made many narrow escapes during his time in Vietnam.

I am a woman and, second, I have been to war. I am a combat veteran. This is not a war on women, and anytime Democrats use the word 'war,' they need to do it to honor our servicemen and women.

You know, I had gone to war.

A lot of songwriters have written about soldiers and war, but very few have written with them.

It has always seemed to me that the most difficult part of building a bridge would be the start.

Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars a year just teaching.

War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.

I reckon that the Bailey Bridge and the bulldozer were the greatest advances in military engineering in the years between World War I and World War II.

What need the bridge much broader than the flood?

They put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land to go and kill the Yellow man.

During the battles last night and at dawn, they [ Ba'th Socialist Party fighters] had destroyed three American helicopters

I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s.

No one expected a first year engineering student to build the perfect bridge.