Haskell Wexler Quotes

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

I think war is a dangerous place.

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

The work in Iraq is difficult and it is dangerous. Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real.

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor difference between shooting a dog and shooting a man.

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

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

Poor Andy Nave was killed. He refused to surrender and was shot by Dick Fields. I felt sorry as he used to be quite friendly towards me before the war, but it could not be helped.

There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell

I have always done my best to keep my young men quiet, but some will not listen, and since the fighting began I have not been able to keep them all at home.

There is nothing in our experience that can capture the fear that Israelis now live with every hour of every day, where allowing your children to go to a pizza parlor or a disco or just to play in the park can be a choice between life and death.

I hope to stay unemployed as a war photographer till the end of my life

A nation's youths shouldn't be sent off to die.

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children.

There are some similarities, of course (between Iraq and Vietnam). Death is terrible.

Living in war is a co- existence with death.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

Certain blood will be given for half certain reasons, as in all wars.

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.