Gus Grissom Quotes

I fought in Korea, front line. I knew who the enemy were. The enemy were the people who were firing at me. And shooting at me.

When I was in the Army, 100 percent of our effort was to really be sharp, and soldiers, we were under live fire all the time.

I'm a combat soldier.

In my teens, I joined the Parachute Regiment. I jumped out of lots of airplanes, as much as the Government budget would allow us to. I did two active tours of duty: Northern Ireland, and then the Falklands war.

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

I did three tours in Vietnam. I guess a total of about almost two years.

I have never once claimed that I have a Combat Action Badge. I have never claimed that I have a Purple Heart. What I have claimed is that I have served in a combat zone.

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's a tendency to look at anybody who joined the military as if they underwrote everything that happened policy-wise. That's not really the case. I have a friend who both protested the Iraq War and joined the military, and ended up serving two deployments in Afghanistan.

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

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.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

I got called back into the Navy during the Korean War.

The thing that strikes you most about being a soldier in a war zone and in action to the small extent that I was, when actually people start shooting, which happened to me a couple of times, everything goes on automatic and there's a feeling of tremendous elevation and even elation.

I'd been in college studying English creative writing and history when I made the decision to join the Marines in the runup to the Iraq war.

To be a soldier one needs that special gene, that extra something, that enables a person to jump into one on one combat, something, after all, that is unimaginable to most of us, as we are simply not brave enough.

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

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

When they ran out of cadre men they gave me my very own platoon and said, 'Here are 63 men, try to keep as many of them alive as you possibly can.' That was one of the more harrowing experiences of my life.

I shot down some German planes and I got shot down myself, crashing in a burst of flames and crawling out, getting rescued by brave soldiers.

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.

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

I shot down two airplanes in Korea, so I wasn't a slouch.

They told me I'd never probably see the front-line area.

My work as a naval officer in World War II enabled me to serve on 49 different South Pacific islands so that I came to know the area about as well as anyone.