War Memoir Quotes

“I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books.”
― Michael Anthony, Civilianized: A Young Veteran's Memoir

“A successful suicide doesn't just happen, although, of course, there are exceptions. Someone happens to be walking across a bridge when the feeling hits. Or they're on the roof of a building and realize they have nothing to live for. But most of the time, suicide takes planning. That's the way I figured. The was I was figuring...”
― Michael Anthony, Civilianized: A Young Veteran's Memoir

“I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too.”
― Michael Anthony, Civilianized: A Young Veteran's Memoir

“Many Germans nowadays say they were not Nazi, and many were not, but they were nearly ALL Party members. It was safer ... and if you were not, you could end up in a ‘camp’ for retraining ... so they mostly all paid ‘lip service’ to the Nazi Party.”
― Alfred Nestor, Uncle Hitler: A Child's Traumatic Journey Through Nazi Hell to the Safety of Britain

“My body was the strongest it had ever been, and no one knew there was really a six-year-old girl inside it, small and terrified.”
― Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured: A Memoir

“Poor bastard, I thought, listening to him. He’s trying to hide from us. He’s dying, and he knows we want to kill him. What a fate: to gasp your life out all alone in the mud of a dirty little creek, helpless to hold off the slow death that is inside you and the quicker death that is walking up on you on the other side of the water. A death without love, a death without hope. God, who invented war?
But if he gets back alive, I may be dead.”
― David Kenyon Webster, Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper's Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich

“I found myself asking the big question in spy school that wasn't on any test:
How does a scholar, a strategist, or a soldier understand a culture well enough to predict future outcomes without being willing to understand that all humans, from their own perspectives, are living a truth and reality as valid as ours?”
― Daniella Mestyanek Young, Uncultured: A Memoir

“I just call a volunteer standing two steps next to me who holds
his head out for too long after the shot. At that moment, his head jolts, the
familiar and terrible dull sound of the bullet’s impact sounds, and the man
slowly collapses. The bullet penetrated the forehead and tore off half the
skullcap behind. Still mid-fall, he claws his hands into the wound and smears
himself over and over with his own brain. It was a terrible sight.”
― Philipp Cross, The Other Trench: The WW1 Diary and Photos of a German Officer