natasha

“I am the harvest of man's stupidity. I am the fruit of the holocaust. I prayed like you to survive, but look at me now. It is over for us who are dead, but you must struggle, and will carry the memories all your life. People back home will wonder why you can't forget.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waste... The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and to try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other - and love. That espirit de corps sustained us.”
― Eugene B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

“Everything and all the world became my enemy, and soon my very body betrayed me and became my foe. My leg became a creeping Japanese, and then the other leg. My arms, too, and then my head.
My heart was alone. It was me. I was my heart.
It lay quivering, I lay quivering, in that rotten hole while the darkness gathered and all creation conspired for my heart.
How long? I lay for an eternity. There was no time. Time had disintegrated in that black void. There was only emptiness, and that is Something; there was only being; there was only consciousness.
Like the light that comes up suddenly in a darkened theatre, daylight came quickly. Dawn came, and so myself came back to myself. I could see the pale outlines of my comrades to right and left, and I marvelled to see how tame the tree could be, how unforbidding could be its branches.
I know now why men light fires”
― Robert Leckie, Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific

“I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I'll be forced to relive it one day.”
― Anne Berest, The Postcard