Anita Shreve Quotes

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.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

I was only a gun captain on the battleship Alabama for 34 months. People have called me a hero for that, but I'll tell you this - heroes don't come home. Survivors come home.

The men and women who serve in our military have won for us every hour we live in freedom, sometimes at the expense of the very hours of the lifetimes they had hoped to live.

On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

Israel should not feel satisfaction at my son's death, for he died on the battlefield, facing the conquerors as he wished, with a gun in his hand.

I have seen heroics - soldiers saving other soldiers' lives - and horrors.

Some made the ultimate sacrifice. The rest of us were lucky.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers

A professional soldier understands that war means killing people, war means maiming people, war means families left without fathers and mothers. All you have to do is hold your first dying soldier in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that his life is flowing out and you can’t do anything about it. Then you understand the horror of war.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

History has taught us over and over again that freedom is not free. When push comes to shove, the ultimate protectors of freedom and liberty are the brave men and women in our armed forces. Throughout our history, they've answered the call in bravery and sacrifice.

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.

When you've married someone who's been at war, there is nothing you can do that compares to that level of selflessness and bravery.

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.

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow: In Flanders fields.

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

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

Blood and death. That moves me.

Athletes as role models and heroes is a hoax, a sick hoax. The men and women who are fighting in Iraq, they are the true heroes.

Before I begin talking about the threats we face, the vulnerabilities that we have, and frankly the courage of the men and women in uniform that stand in harm's way on behalf of a very grateful Nation, let me first honor the sacrifices of September 11.

Vets are close to my heart, okay, and it's not only because I served, okay. It's because of what they go through, okay. A lot of these people have gave their lives, a lot of them have gave their limbs, okay, you know, that's a, that's a, that's a heap, you know.

'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'

A true war story is never moral.