War

Only the dead know the end of war. –Plato

Blunders are an inescapable feature of war, because choice in military affairs generally lies between the bad and the worse. –Allan Massie

If you want to know how Congressional Medals of Honor are won—that is, where men have been virtually willing to throw away their lives—it’s usually at the level of the squad, or eight to ten [men]. Soldiers don’t charge a machine-gun nest because they care so much about American democracy, but in support of their squad or buddies. –Edwin O. Wilson

Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their posts and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale. … Comrades are loyal to each other and without any need for reasons. –J. Glen Gray

People say that the memorial transcends politics. These responses all miss the brilliance of what Lin did. The Vietnam Memorial is a piece about death for a culture in which people are constantly being told that life is the only thing that matters. It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a way, no matter what else it is about, people die. … Maintaining that the memorial is apolitical is the civic thing to do: reconciliation is what we want memorials to promote. But the conservatives were not mistaken. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the great anti-war statements of all time.

Peace in the Middle East could be achieved in two ways, a political solution and a miracle. The political solution would be if God came down to earth and decreed that all the groups should live in peace. The miracle would be if the leaders got together on their own. –Khalil Jahshan

There are no bad regiments; there are only bad colonels. –Napoleon

Verdun is the most tragic place you can think of with the exception of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is a monument to human evil; Verdun is a monument to human absurdity. –Dominique Moisi

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. –Ambrose Bierce

[A]t High Wood, …, I saw one of the most affecting memorials of my tour, a cairn memorializing the Glasgow Highlanders. The cairn is made of 192 stones brought from Culloden, one for each man killed here. It is five feet, seven inches tall, which was the minimum height required of recruits for the battalion. The inscription on the cairn reads: “Just here, Children of Gael went down shoulder to shoulder on 15 July 1916.” The only words that matched those were on a stone plaque outside the Devonshire Cemetery near Mametz. They read: “The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it still.”

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. –Oliver Wendell Holmes

Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things that we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. –Donald Rumsfeld

Whether [the latest model diesel-powered Russian submarine] is so quiet that U.S. submariners will no longer be able to detect it until it begins sinking ships or destroying cities—known archly as “providing flaming data”—is an imponderable of the post-Cold War world.

Anyone who isn’t confused doesn’t really understand the situation. –Walter Bryan on Vietnam

To be killed in a war is not the worst thing that can happen. To be lost is not the worst. To be forgotten is the worst. –Pierre Claeyssens

It’s hard to be a hero without a war. That’s why I’m so suspicious of the military. –Lyndon B. Johnson

Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics. –Gen. Omar Bradley

Radar—which has not been a useful tool for 40 years—generally provides more information to the enemy than to the user. In this realm, the periscope is valuable beyond all comprehension of a nonsubmariner. It is the only unambiguous sensor available to the submariner; but it is also a source of unambiguous detection for surface and air submarine hunters. … [I]n submarine operations the desire to look exceeds that in all other human activities, except perhaps poker. This urge grows exponentially with uncertainty. The more inexperienced the captain, the greater the itch. The well-trained and practiced can take a good look in six to ten seconds, but most spend half a minute or more. … Adding to the submarine’s inherent technical complexity is the paucity of clues about the outside world and the constant pressure of high pressure water on all sides. Submarines—essentially, ships that sink intentionally—are stressful work places as a matter of routine. –Adm. W. J. Holland

Only part of us is sane. The other half of us is nearly mad … and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings. –Rebecca West (Cicily Isabel Fairfield)

Whether or not we avoid another war, we are covered with prospective guilt. –Reinhold Niebuhr

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way. –John Paul Jones

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. –George Orwell

I love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than my life. –Gen. George S. Patton (George C. Scott), Patton

Patton had two phrases that he used almost ad nauseum. The first, from Danton, was: “Audacity, always audacity, still more audacity.” The second was “the unforgiving minute,” a phrase from Kipling that referred to certain times in war when the collective will of a people or an army can without warning collapse—critical moments that must be capitalized on.

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat. --Jean-Paul Sartre

Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.  –Thomas Pynchon, written of the Watts riot

Every boy ought to learn to shoot and to obey orders, else he is no more good when war breaks out than an old woman, and merely gets killed like a squealing rabbit.  –Robert Baden-Powell

All inventions in the improvements of arms tend to place the weak on a level with the strong; we are the strong, and therefore do not encourage improvements.  –Lord Raglan, 1826

According to Amory, in 1919, Lord Dunsany took out a new notebook in which he intended to answer the challenge of the day and pasted into it a line clipped from a newspaper: “It is a great responsibility to have survived the war.” The book remained blank. –Laura Miller

War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes. –Thomas Paine

The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards. –Sir William Francis Butler (quoted by Eliot A. Cohen in support of ROTC)

Man is a military animal, glories in gunpowder, and loves parade. –Phillip James Bailey

[W]ars are generally fought because of a false sense of certainty. Usually some leader thinks he is a God, or talks to God, or descended from the Gods, or thinks God gave his people some particular piece of real estate. The leader’s opinion is the most certain in the land. People flock to certainty and adopt the certainty as their own. The next thing you know, stuff is blowing up. You can take any major problem in the world and identify a key culprit who has more certainty than he or she should. For example, Osama Bin Laden is certain that Allah exists, and he’s certain that humans can know what an omnipotent being wants us to do. That hasn’t worked out well for anyone. –Scott Adams

I think refugees are part of the makeup of who Europeans are. There is always a part of the European mind that is half-packed and ready to go. –Andrei Codrescu

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on. –Ulysses S. Grant

Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. –Duke of Wellington

War is a coward’s escape from the problems of peace. –William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

[John Master’s] writing is suffused with nostalgia for the regiment in which he served in the 1930s, the Prince of Wales’ Own 4^th Gurkha Rifles. The Nepalese tribesman known as Gurkhas have been fighting under the Union Jack since 1815. Masters was rapturous in describing their “straightness, honesty, naturalness, loyalty, courage”—all qualities illustrated in a famous anecdote about a group of Gurkhas who in 1940 were asked to jump out of an airplane.

Only 70 men came forward at first. One hundred men were needed. The British officers, crestfallen, “called upon the sacred honor of the regiment and vowed that the parachutes never—well, hardly ever—failed to open.” Upon hearing this, a lance naik (lance corporal) happily exclaimed, “Oh, we jump with parachutes, do we? That’s different.” And thereupon the entire regiment volunteered. –Max Boot

I meet daily numbers of people each of whom is capable of losing the war singlehanded. –Munia Postan, working in England’s Ministry of Economic Warfare, Oct., 1939

The barrage of bombs and rockets brought one’s life to a higher pitch of tension than ever before. Surviving the blasts produced grim humor and constant exhilaration. We would say to one another, “I’m not worried till a bomb comes with my name on it.” But, as a friend said to me while a V-1 roared overhead, “To hell with the bomb with my name on it. The bomb I’m worried about is the one marked: ‘To whom it may concern.’” --Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Of course the war was never over for my generation. We pretended it was, went home, picked up the broken threads of our lives. Many sought education under the GI Bill, married the girls they left behind, produced the baby boom and looked to the future, not the past. The war seemed to slip away, almost as if we were in deliberate denial. Farley Mowat, the Canadian writer, spoke for the generation when he said about the war, “I kept the deeper agonies of it wrapped in the cotton wool of protective forgetfulness.” --Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

(in the Thirty Years War) I wandered I knew not whither, and followed I knew not whom. –Sydenham Poyntz

(the fog of war) A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. –Napoleon Bonaparte

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. –General and President Dwight David Eisenhower

I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men's memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war. –A. J. Liebling

Wherever there's injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it's happening. –P. J. O’Rourke

[In the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union] behaved like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around the room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision. –Henry Kissinger

“I consider the destruction of the enemy’s fleet of so much consequence,” he [wrote],” that I would willingly have half of mine burned to effect their destruction. I am in a fever. God send I may find them.” … Nelson’s declared purpose, in letter after letter, was simple and total: “annihilation.” The spirit of Achilles was in him. –Adam Nicholson, of Admiral Horatio Nelson

The sword is mightier than the pen. –Art Buchwald

War is Cruelty. The Crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. –Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman