Laurence Housman Quotes

I am one of the million or more male residents of the United Kingdom, who a year ago had no special yearning towards military life, but who joined the army after war was declared.

Remember that everybody signed up as fast as they could in World War I because they thought the war would be over by Christmas.

We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.

One thing that was amazing about World War II was that everybody signed up for the duration plus six months. Fliers got to leave combat after 25 missions, or 35 missions, but other than that, you were in it. You were part of the great effort, until, oh boy, six months after it was over.

With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.

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.

I want you for US Army

When I was 18, I went into the army as a payroll clerk because otherwise I was headed for Korea.

I joined the Rhodesian army in 1975, having trained for six weeks outside Bulawayo.

But I felt it necessary to be part of the war effort and I enlisted in the Navy to be a flyer.

In the beginning of the Great War, the emotions of Europe ran riot in a most horrible manner, first among the so-called 'living,' and then among the killed when they awoke.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment.

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.

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

Indeed, the Roman laws allowed no person to be carried to the wars but he that was in the soldiers' roll.

I come from a family of pacifists, so it's not like I was going to join the war. Sweden is not like the States or England where you might get sent to Afghanistan next month.

The French suffered such catastrophic losses in the First World War. It really was the end of them as a great world power, although they, quote, 'won.'

I was drafted during the Korean War.

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

I wanted to write a song about war and that classic 'We want you' recruitment style from the point of view of the recruiter.

My father was in the First World War.

It was 1943. The U.S. had already entered World War II, so I decided to join the army.

My grandmother was German. She was an immigrant, and my great grandfather fought in World War I and was stationed in France.

I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.