Combat Experience Quotes

I was on Saipan when I got hit. Not too bad, but bad enough to hamper me if I stayed. I was hit in my left buttocks just below the belt line.

I took every chance I could to meet with U.S. soldiers. I talked with them and read the books they gave me about the war. I decided I needed to return to my country and join with them - active duty soldiers and Vietnam Veterans in particular - to try and end the war.

Armament is an important factor in war but not the decisive factor .... Man, not material, forms the decisive factor.

I would like to have had that experience of combat. I would have liked to.

In the re-creation of combat situations, and this is coming from a director who's never been in one, being mindful of what these veterans have actually gone through, you find that the biggest concern is that you don't look at war as a geopolitical endeavor.

I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.

I've been in a few fights and I know what it's like to get punched in the face.

To expect ... the same service from raw and undisciplined recruits, as from veteran soldiers, is to expect what never did and perhaps never will happen. Men, who are familiarized to danger, meet it without shrinking; whereas troops unused to service often apprehend danger where no danger is.

That first loss in the UFC was a tough one. I hadn't fought in a year, and you start again, different organisation, different scenario, and it all plays into it.

I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

Before they deploy, they train for the specific operations, but there is a danger that the Army is not retaining the core of its full capabilities.

In picking Gen. Jim Mattis for Defense secretary, President-elect Donald Trump has said that he found his 'Gen. George Patton.' Yet that label may not really capture what makes Mattis a distinctive choice.

It's easier to get people to talk to you if you're a vet and you want to interview a vet about war. Sometimes they open up a little bit easier.

We don’t need corporate generals. We need warrior generals…. Many of our military leaders are like car designers who have never driven a car….they go along to get along.

This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.

I suddenly remember something I've been told about fear. That amid a hail of machine gun fire you notice the existence of your skin.

For the record, I'm a Second World War veteran and served in the Pacific.

Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support.

Mom's dad was in the army, stormed the beach at Normandy, fought through the French hedgerows, the Battle of the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge, and liberated concentration camps at the end of the war.

You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.

I'm from a generation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our battleground was where we learned. It's not like the old generation where they used to train and train and train, and then suddenly an operation would come up, and they'd go on it.

A handful of men, inured to war, proceed to certain victory, while on the contrary, numerous armies of raw and undisciplined troops are but multitudes of men dragged to the slaughter.

Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses. ...Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand.

We, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, we who have seen our relatives and friends killed before our eyes, we who have attended their funerals and cannot look into the eyes of their parents, we who have come from a land where parents bury their children, we who have fought against you, the Palestinians We say to you today in a loud and clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough.