Fallen Soldiers Quotes

“From out of the ground a eulogy grows and becomes a poppy.”
― Nanette L. Avery

“Everyone standing on the road as the body went past had been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the Corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It’d been an image of death from another world. But now I know where that corpse was headed, to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would have gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.”
― Phil Klay, Redeployment

“Those numbers had names, and many had family; each of those losses was keenly felt. No, there was nothing casual about casualties when they were your friends and countrymen.”
― Daniel Thorman, Mayhem at the Mill

“To return to Gibbon for a moment. The great epitaph for the fallen soldiers on the last page of Sunset Song is more than effective; in an early chapter it might have roused sneers. But Gibbon himself would not have written it there.”
― David Angus, Jabberwock: Edinburgh University Review, Volume 3, No. 2: Summer 1950