Giles Duley Quotes

No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

I had hope, however; I had been wounded seven times during the war, and once before in this same lung; and I did not believe I was going to die.

That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into.

My situation should have been a lot worse. By rights I shouldn't have survived the crash.

I spent five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, kept in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again?

I have friends who have had PTSD, and you can get it from other things than war.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.

I spent four days and four nights just covered in blood, falling in the water.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don't let yourself believe it will happen to you.

What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.

But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.

What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.

The last thing I ever thought would ever happen to me was losing my legs.

I was 21, and rehearsing a play, took a fall and was in a coma for a few days. And when I recovered, I'd lost my sense of smell completely.

I've got cut half in two, once, and blowed up a time or two, but nothing permanent.

I grew up being told by my parents each time they went off to war that they may explode, so I needed to know how things like the gadgets in the kitchen worked.

I am short a cheekbone and an ear but am able to whip all hell yet.

I wasn't a hero. I just got shot.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

If you fell down, you were dead.

Women have long found themselves grieving for the dead and caring for the wounded during and after war, but … as more and more women become war fighters themselves, they too face danger and see horrors, often with the added burden if sexual harassment and worse at the hands of their fellow warriors—burdens aggravated by official indifference.

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

When you're on the battlefield, you switch off your soul; otherwise, you would die of terror - you would die of fear. You switch off your soul, and you act like an animal or a machine.

I entered the navy with the great ambition of becoming a naval soldier and going to war. Either I die from this festering wound - because I refuse to have my arm amputated - or I recover from it and continue being a soldier. I have a one-in-two chance, and I shall bet my life on it!