War Injuries Quotes

A man goes and fights for his country, gets his inside gassed out, and loses his job, and all they give him is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph once a year and paying four shillings in the pound income-tax.

My body was torn apart by an enemy hand grenade... upon arriving at Camp Bastion, I was labeled P.E.A. - patient expired on arrival. I flat-lined at Walter Reed.

The ground was strewn with the dead, the dying, and the wounded—here lay one man with his leg shot off, there another with a wound in his head, another with an arm shot off, and hundreds wounded in nearly all the various parts of the body.

When I was in the army, there were four times that I was wounded. I also got more than 30 wounds on my body, and my injuries were ranked on the second rank of invalids. The first rank is the most severe. So, that means that I had lost more than 60 per cent of working capability.

In the three years since our nation began operations in Iraq, more than 2,500 Americans have been killed and more than 18,000 Americans have been seriously wounded.

America has also forever lost the service of thousands of good soldiers who are now disabled as a result of battle wounds in Iraq. Many others will need mental and emotional rehabilitation before they can return to normal life.

The vast area of the second story of that noblest of Washington buildings, the Patent Office, is crowded close with rows of sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers. They are placed in three very large apartments. I have gone there many times. It is strange, solemn, and with all its features of suffering and death.

We noted the psychological problems facing many of the returning from Iraq veterans - of the 700,000 returning veterans, more than a 100,000 have been diagnosed with problems, but the numbers are likely to get worse, as those with multiple deployments return. We should have valued the loss of life as a result of these suicides, using the same procedures we used for the loss of those who died in combat.

The POW camps of North Vietnam were packed with Air Force and Naval Academy graduates. The six midshipmen in my Naval Academy class of 1968 who served as liaisons between the Marine Corps and the Brigade of Midshipmen later suffered nine Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and one man killed in action.

I was called up in the war and sent to a hospital. I dressed wounds, applied iodine, gave enemas, did blood transfusions. If the doctor ordered: "Brecht, amputate a leg!", I would reply, "Certainly, Your Excellency!", and cut off the leg. If I was told, "Perform a trepanning!" I opened the man's skull and messed about with his brains. I saw how they patched fellows up, so as to cart them back to the Front as quickly as they could.

I cannot say how touched and impressed I have been by the sight of these noble brave, and so sadly wounded men and how anxious I feel to be of use to them, and to try and get some employment for those who are maimed for life. Those who are discharged will receive very small pensions but not sufficient to live upon.

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

I'm afraid that my wife picked up a number of colorful expressions from the Yanks and such, Frank offered, with a nervous smile. True, I said, gritting my teeth as I wrapped a water-soaked napkin about my hand. Men tend to be very colorful when you're picking shrapnel out of them.

We must make sure that all of our returning servicemembers are honored and taken care of, no matter the wounds they bear.

There is the utmost order & contentment in their [the British] hospitals. The wounded whom we brought off from the field were not half so well treated as those whom we left in General Howe's hands. Our Officers and Soldiers spoke with gratitude and affection of their Surgeons. An orderly man was allotted to every ten of our wounded, and British Officers called every morning upon our officers to know whether their Surgeons did their duty.

I am classified as a disabled veteran. The reason I'm disabled is because I have wounds and injuries that I got while on active duty... from parachute jumping to combat to gunshot wounds, all that stuff.

Our veterans should never be penalized for injuries they sustained in service to our country.

I'd like people to listen to our soldiers. They were there. They heard the alarms go off. They tasted the substance in the air. They spit up blood. They had rashes on their bodies. They got sick.

Will it be a great source of comfort to certain Canadian boys to know that the bullet that maimed them for life was made from Canadian nickel sold by the International Nickel Company?

It's hard for people sometimes to relate to me. They weren't in the military, they weren't injured overseas in Iraq, they weren't burned, they didn't go through 33 surgeries, or two and a half years in the hospital.

When we began filming, these people had legs, but as we were filming, they had been injured and they were brought to the hospital to have their legs amputated, and that's where we found them and asked them to come and be part of the film.

The United States government was proud that, although perhaps 100,000 Iraqis had died in the Gulf War of 1991, there were only 48 American battle casualties. What it has concealed from the public is that 206,000 veterans of that war filed claims with the VA for injuries and illnesses. In the years since that war, 8,300 veterans have died, and 160,000 claims for disability have been recognized by the VA.

These same people that tolerate the real violence of war don't want to see the result of it on the nightly news. Unlike the rest of the world, our news coverage of this war remains sanitized, without a glimpse of the blood and gore inflicted upon our soldiers or the women and children in Iraq. Violence as a concept, an abstraction – it's very strange

But Gulf War Syndrome is not one cause, not one illness. It is many causes, many illnesses.

Marines dying or being seriously wounded is commonplace in combat.