Elliot Ackerman Quotes

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

As one who participated in all the wars of the state of Israel, I saw the horror of wars. I saw the fear of wars. I saw my best friends being killed in battles. I was seriously injured twice.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

No one hates war like a soldier hates war.

I'm glad I never went to war.

In war, it feels like everything you're doing is more important because you're in the proximity of violence and death, and that proximity changes your relationship to America because it changes the way you see the world.

When this sad war is over we will all return to our homes, and feel that we can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac.

Surviving is the only glory in war.

Everything starts and finishes with the soldier.

Sacrifice is going to war for your country. Sacrifice is a brave young man being blown up by a landmine in Afghanistan.

The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

The generals were fighting machine guns with the breasts of gallant men.

And when the war is done and youth stone dead I'd toddle safely home and die—in bed.

You know, I had gone to war.

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

War is an arena for the display of courage and virtue. Or war is politics by other means. War is a quasi-mystical experience where you get in touch with the real. There are millions of narratives we impose to try to make sense of war.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

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

No one really wants to send their kids off to die for oil.

Revenge by young men is considered gain, even at the cost of their own lives, but old men who stay at home in times of war, and mothers who have sons to lose, know better.

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.

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

Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows.

War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.