Tag: War

Quotes June 19, 2020

Here’s a quote from an Army inspector in 1916 that you can save for some future OER or NCOER: “As an exhibition of incompetency, it was entirely successful”
Courtesy of The Angry Staff Officer
 
 
 
 
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia…could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”
Abraham Lincoln
 
 
 
 
“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell”
General Philip Henry Sheridan
 
 
 
 
“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest
 
 
 
 
“This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11th…. Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.”
George Packer
 
 
 
 
Some people tried to hurt us to protect themselves, their family and communities…This was one of the consequences of civil war. People stopped trusting each other, and every stranger became an enemy. Even people who knew you became extremely careful about how they related or spoke to you.”
Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
 
 
 
 
“For twenty-five years I’ve been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You’ve been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say!”
Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
 
 
 
 
“If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.”
Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Quotes May 01, 2020

Two young soldiers were exchanging their experiences of the service in the Army.

“My sergeants are wonderful”, said one soldier.

“I wish I could say the same about mine,” said the other.

“You could if you could lie as I do.”
 
 
 
 
“Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have strength.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
 
 
 
 
The relationship between a military working dog and a military dog handler is about as close as a man and a dog can become. You see this loyalty, the devotion, unlike any other and the protectiveness.
Robert Crais
 
 
 
 
Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.
Curtis Lemay
 
 
 
 
The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.
Douglas MacArthur
 
 
 
 
In World War II in Germany, we had a ration for one U.S. soldier, or one allied soldier for every twenty inhabitants. The ratio in Iraq is about one for a hundred and sixty.
William Odom
 
 
 
 
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Erich Maria Remarque

Quotes February 21, 2020

“Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”
Niccolò Machiavelli
 
 
 
 
“It would be a joke if the conduct of the victor had to be justified to the vanquished.”
“If you wage war, do it energetically and with severity. This is the only way to make it shorter and consequently less inhuman.”
Napoléon Bonaparte
 
 
 
 
“So we go on and don’t do it, and let the war go on. Over a period of 3 and a half or four years, we did burn down every town in North Korea. And every town in South Korea. And what? Killed off 20% of the Korean population. What I’m trying to say is, if once you make a decision to use military force to solve your problem – then you ought to use it. And use an overwhelming military force. Use too much. And deliberately use too much. So that you don’t make an error on the other side, and not quite have enough. And you roll over everything to start with. And you close it down just like that. You save resources. You save lives. Not only your own but the enemies too. And the recovery is quicker. And everybody is back to peaceful existence – hopefully in a shorter period of time.”
Gen. Curtis Lemay, on the all-out bombing campaign the U.S. didn’t do at the beginning of the Korean War as quoted in Dan Carlin’s “The Destroyer of Worlds”
 
 
 
 
“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
Robert Lynd
 
 
 
 
“Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov.”
Russian Proverb, due to the threat of Chinese influence in Siberia

Quotes December 27, 2019

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.
George Washington
 
 
 
 
“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
President Abraham Lincoln, 1860, Collected Works
 
 
 
 
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
 
 
 
 
The war… was an unnecessary condition of affairs, and might have been avoided if forebearance and wisdom had been practiced on both sides.
Robert E. Lee
 
 
 
 
Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.
Omar N. Bradley

Quotes February 15, 2019

I am the Flail of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would have not sent a punishment like me upon you.
Genghis Khan
 
 
 
 
If officers desire to have control over their commands, they must remain habitually with them, industriously attend to their instruction and comfort, and in battle lead them well.
Stonewall Jackson
 
 
 
 
Dec. 23, 1944 – “Battle of the Bulge” – An entire U.S. armored division was retreating from the Germans in the Ardennes forest when a sergeant in a tank destroyer spotted an American digging a foxhole. The GI, PFC Martin, 325th Glider Infantry Regiment, looked up and asked, “Are you looking for a safe place?” “Yeah” answered the tanker. “Well, buddy,” he drawled, “just pull your vehicle behind me…I’m the 82nd Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are going.”
 
 
 
 
“If there is a god, he’ll have to beg for my forgiveness”
Written on the walls of a concentration camp by an anonymous victim of the Nazis.

Quotes December 07, 2018

“No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb. We know now that a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, on why appeasing Adolf Hitler and the Nazi government in Germany was not a rational policy.
 
 
 
 
Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning.
Erwin Rommel
 
 
 
 
How happy had it been for me had I been slain in the battle. It had been far more noble to have died the victim of the enemy than fall a sacrifice to the rage of my friends.
Alexander the Great
 
 
 
 
A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.
Golda Meir
 
 
 
 
This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Quotes November 30, 2018

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”
Henri Barbusse, 1916
 
 
 
 
“The cries of the wounded had much diminished now, and as we staggered down the road, the reason was only too apparent, for the water was right over the tops of the shell-holes.”
Captain Edwin Vaughan, 1917
 
 
 
 
“I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”
Nurse Vera Brittain, 1933

Quotes November 23, 2018

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.
John Adams
 
 
 
 
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
William Tecumseh Sherman
 
 
 
 
I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost – and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.
Walter Cronkite
 
 
 
 
As to war, I am and always was a great enemy, at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life and were I young again, should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived.
Daniel Morgan

Our Third Thirds: I am who I am because of Vietnam

“Vietnam touched us. All of us. Bombs didn’t land on our homes, but they detonated in our lives.”

Source: Our Third Thirds: I am who I am because of Vietnam