After the loss of Columbia a couple of years ago, I think we were reminded of the risk. All of us, though, have always known that the Space Shuttle is a very risky vehicle, much more risky than even flying airplanes in combat.
I have to tell you, in my judgment, some of us sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. I want you to think about it.
No one dropped out.
If one is a professional soldier, it is part of one's job to die sooner or later.
I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.
Soldiers willingly, sometimes foolishly, risk their own lives to keep their comrades out of enemy hands.
Our soldiers in combat should have the same insurance policies that the Congress has.
For God's sake, take care of your men. If they fire, they die!
In battle, you forgive a man anything except an unwillingness to take risks. Sometimes you have to put it on the line.
[When I ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan] that was the first time in which I looked out at a crowd of West Point graduates and knew that some of those might not come back because of that decision.
[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)
I would have rather been dead and laying on the battlefield dead than to find out later on that one of my men were killed and didn't have me, their medic, to somehow get them out of the danger and into the safety of the perimeter.
And there's this talk that we're asking soldiers to make the greatest sacrifice, but the reality is that civilians bear the burden of war more than the combatants. You're much more likely to get accidentally blown up or killed by a death squad than you are to die in a firefight.
The anxiety of most parents in seeing their sons and daughters enlist does not lie only in the fear of the physical dangers they may encounter.
You could be a Green Beret and a kid could jump out from behind a building and hit you with a rock. No matter how tough you become in the military, there's a way to die: there's nothing safe about it.
Chain-mail isn't much defence against an arrow. It certainly isn't when the arrow is being aimed between your eyes.
What if one of her father’s soldiers panicked and fired for no reason? Though pilots were carefully trained, mistakes happened and she didn’t want to be included in a statistics report under “uh-oh, my bad.”’ (Kiara)
Whenever you're fighting with weapons, there's a level of reality because people don't understand that these are still metal or hard rubber with sharp points - that if the timing's wrong, you could definitely get hurt. There's nothing like working with an actor who doesn't know what they're doing, because you're always in fear of losing an eye.
If you start throwing eight or nine shots, you're going to get caught - bang - and the fight could be over.
When you're a Viking, you never know when you're going to get the axe.
Kicking leaves you momentarily on one foot, and for that moment you are in a very weak position. If you were to be swept off your feet, you would be finished. This is why lifting your feet off the ground is crazy.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances.
