#soldiers

Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans. But we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. The stories we heard later; the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners; the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors; “Johnny Got His Gun” and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I could not look into the future. ↗

— David Kenyon Webster

#war #home

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. ↗

— Teresa TutenAuthor

#memories #soldiers #dreams

Here's how I think of my money - as soldiers - I send them out to war everyday. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there's more of them. ↗

— Kevin O'Leary

#everyday #here #home #how #i

In the remaining months, we should focus on achieving more robust international involvement in training of Iraqi soldiers, police officers, judges, teachers, and doctors - all key elements needed to end the sectarian and civil conflict and build Iraq's future. ↗

— John Olver

#build #civil #conflict #doctors #elements

Sacrificing American soldiers or innocent civilians in an unprecedented preemptive attack on a separate sovereign nation may well prove itself a most temporary medicine. ↗

— Sean Penn

#american soldiers #attack #civilians #innocent #innocent civilians

We can no longer apply the classic criteria to clearly determine whether and when we should use military force. We are waging war in Afghanistan, for example, but it's an asymmetrical war where the enemies are criminals instead of soldiers. ↗

— Otto Schily

#apply #classic #clearly #criminals #criteria

Yea ! by your works are ye justified--toil unrelieved ; Manifold labours, co-ordinate each to the sending achieved ; Discipline, not of the feet but the soul, unremitting, unfeigned ; Tortures unholy by flame and by maiming, known, faced, and disdained ; Courage that suns Only foolhardiness ; even by these, are ye worthy of your guns. ↗

— Gilbert Frankau

#guns #soldiers #suffering #trenches #war

All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#soldiers #war #word-war-two #dreams

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost. ↗

— Erich Maria Remarque

#forlorn #lost #old #soldiers #sorrow

Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#soldiers #men