RaeLynn Quotes

I remember every moment of every gunfight I've ever been in.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

I just want to get the bad guys but if I can’t see them, I can’t shoot them.

Most of these who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war.

I was in the army, Terri. Special Ops, sent into the most godforsaken places you can imagine, where I did unspeakable things. We weren’t exactly sent in to teach our enemies to knit. (Nathan)

Having been in the military myself, there is an awful moment when you're in this moment of conflict.

You're never more alive than in battle." "Never more dead after," I say.

One of the things that really got to me was talking to parents who had been burned out of their villages, had family members killed, and then when men showed up at the wells to get water, they were shot.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

As a combat veteran, I know the cost of war.

From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.

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.

War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

Wars are begun by frightened men.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

Every time I kill someone, he can't plant an I.E.D. You don't think twice about it.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

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

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

If you're going to write about war, the ugly side is inevitable. Suffering and death are obviously part of war.

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers.