wartime sacrifice Quotes

I'm a Veteran. I was in the Navy, in the submarine corps. I come from a military family. Both of my grandparents were in World War II and retired as officers. One fought in the Pacific and one fought in Europe. The whole family was in the war. I grew up exposed to it and hearing the stories, but the stories I heard weren't kind of the whole "Rah, rah, rah! We saved the world!" They were about the personal price and the emotional price.

We are all proud of is World War II where we went in, we were decisive, we came to the conclusion that freedom prevailed, and we were heroes.

I'm a big supporter of the military simply because I'm the daughter of a Polish immigrant who fled Europe during World War II from Poland and lied about his age to join the Army simply because he was proud to be an American. And who isn't?

The Tsar lives in twenty rooms, let him occupy no more than five and have only five heated in the winter. He is served six dishes at table; let them give him three or four. The Tsaritsa will wear only a black dress...she will seem lovelier and sweeter to us. Three lumps of sugar are put into their children's tea; let them sip it through a single lump ...and when they complain of its not being sweet, tell them it is because the French are in the Crimea and the English at Kronstadt

In the face of postwar austerity, hundreds of brides-to-be across the country sent Princess Elizabeth their clothing coupons so that she could have the dress of their dreams.

That was not what men and women fought for during the war.

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective.

World War II made war reputable because it was a just war. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. You know how many other just wars there have been? Not many. And the guys I served with became my brothers. If it weren't for World War II, I'd now be the garden editor of The Indianapolis Star. I wouldn't have moved away.

They fought on with a devotion which would puzzle the generation of the 1980s. More surprising, in many instances it would have baffled the men they themselves were before Pearl Harbor. Among MacArthur's ardent infantrymen were cooks, mechanics, pilots whose planes had been shot down, seamen whose ships had been sunk, and some civilian volunteers.

My generation didn't face the kind of urgent, pressing issues that my parents did, who fought through a war and a Depression and know what suffering is. That's why Bob Dole had a tough time with this electorate. He was an old-fashioned curmudgeon who knew about sacrifice, and we didn't know if we could live up to his standards. But we knew we could live up to Bill Clinton's. He's more like one of us.

So far as I am concerned I have no doctrinaire belief in free speech. In the interest of the war it is necessary to sacrifice some of it.