Karl Marlantes Quotes

The lives of prisoners of war after they are returned is almost never discussed, never explored.

You know, veterans come home and they may not be bipolar, but after they've been through a war with PTSD or a head injury, their families have a handful when they come home.

World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing.

It is the youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow... that are the aftermath of war.

When I first came back from Iraq, I of course found myself thinking a lot about it. Not just my experiences, but those of people I talked to, friends, and colleagues.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

When we dwell on the enormity of the Second World War and its victims, we try to absorb all those statistics of national and ethnic tragedy. But, as a result, there is a tendency to overlook the way the war changed even the survivors' lives in ways impossible to predict.

Wars never simply end, not for those in combat and not for the culture, and one way or another, they shape-shift from generation to generation.

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

I'd say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that's a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II.

This gulf war syndrome thing is truly unfortunate, and I've met some of the vets who have this. These are my guys, and I feel terrible about it.

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.

Our family makes us who we are, defines us totally. When you go to a therapist or have analysis, whatever reason you go in for, they will always bring you back to your family. We're strong or weak according to what family we have. You might have left them long ago, might not even talk to them, but something lingers; we have no choice.

News reports don't look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time.

But the memory of war weighs undiminished upon the people's minds. That is because deeper than material wounds, moral wounds are smarting, inflicted by the so- called peace treaties.

If the war has faded into history, democracy's defeat in Vietnam has left deep marks in the consciousness of both nations.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left.

Post-traumatic stress disorder didn't surface as a condition until 1980... that fact was very relevant when I remember back to how these men behaved. A lot of walking on eggshells was required for wives and children.

Kids who don't have moms suffer a lifetime.

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.

When the war of the giants is over the wars of the pygmies will begin.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.