Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.
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.
Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
I was hit by a car. I almost died. My show was taken away from me. I was frightened.
Both of my grandfathers served in World War II, both in the Pacific. One wouldn't talk about it, and one would.
Subconcussive injuries are brain injuries on top of unrecovered brain injuries.
I've done what I could as far as getting physically healthy after my knee injury, and I've done what I could to get mentally healthy after losing my husband.
I became paranoid for a long time: I thought that people were out to harm me.
My experience on 'Jarhead' was life changing.
We're all painfully aware of how suddenly violence can occur, how crippling it is, and how survivors have to find a way back from that.
War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.
The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.
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.
I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
My mum knows people in the village who died or were affected by Agent Orange who had kids who are disabled. I could have been an orphan. So many things could have gone wrong but here I am... I realise how lucky I am to be here.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can.
I've been on 'Criminal Minds' twice! On the first show, a boy brought kids out to the woods and was beating them with a baseball bat, but I got away. Then they brought Tracy, my character, back - as a kidnapped girl. They saved me two times! Tracy lived!
You come back from war, and you have a certain authority to talk about war.
'In Country' is about a high school girl's quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
The most powerful Vietnam movie, to me, was 'The Deer Hunter,' which was more about what happened to the folks who went and about their relationships.
But over 20 years ago I was a victim of rape. And thank god it didn't result in a pregnancy. Because I can't imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker.
'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Alright, let's tackle the worst part of this pandemic: people are dying, or they're worried about their loved ones dying - and it's hard not to spiral out. After almost two decades at war, this has been the reality for military families for a very long time. Welcome to our club.
The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.
