Amos Oz Quotes

To march over dead men, to hear without concern the groans of the wounded, I say few men can stand such scenes unless steeled by habit or fortified by military pride.

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

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.

I don't react to a tragic happening any more. I took so many bad things as a kid and some people think I don't care about anything. It's just too hard for me to get emotional. I can't cry no more.

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.

There are only two ways to come back from the battlefield: With the head of an enemy or without your own.

If we didn't desensitize ourselves in some way, every day would feel like its own tragedy.

In Afghanistan, getting shot at was a regular occurrence. I viewed survival as a numbers game. As point man, every time I entered a Taliban compound first, I played the odds in my head.

My father made many narrow escapes during his time in Vietnam.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

In war it does not matter who is right, but who is left.

Granana doesn't understand what the big deal is. She didn't cry at Olivia's funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia's name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors' garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: "Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons."

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

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.

You heard it from the heart, you saw it in their eyes. Then I got used to the fact that I couldn't feel my fingers and my feet. That for me was the essence of the battle.

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking - well - I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on.

I think for Beecher specifically, Keller was with him when his wife died. Beecher had decided after he first got into prison that he had to shut off everybody. You can't let anybody in and you have to become like them and you have to be threatening and all that.

I thought I was going to be killed. The casualties were so heavy, it was just a given. I learned to take each day, each mission, as it came. That's an attitude I've carried into my professional life. I take each case, each job, as it comes.

There is nothing so satisfying as to be shot at without effect.

In war, people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, and in those circumstances, they act in extraordinary ways. In war, you see people at their very best and their very worst, acting in ways you could never imagine. War is human drama at its most epic and most intense.

I think the brutality is important to convey as part of the story, to see how brutal it is to have these kids in battle with one another.

War is sweet to those who have not experienced it.

I'm glad I never went to war.

I think we were trying to get off Combat from the moment we were on Combat.