They may not be conscripted against their will as the foot soldiers in a federal crusade.
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice.
‘Beasts of No Nation’ began when I read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone during my final year of high school.
If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that’s a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It’s very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it’ll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven’t really seen since the ’50s and ’60s.
Soldiers don’t have a lobby or a political party.
You can make children believe whatever you want, and the children of today are the soldiers and mothers of tomorrow.
While I was serving in the Florida Senate, American soldiers were being killed in Iraq, a war we should have never started, and often by Iranian proxies and their improvised explosive devices.
While the peace process should continue, India must not lower its guard. We can’t allow our people, soldiers and police to be killed by militants from across the border – Pakistan needs to own up responsibility.
I wasn’t thinking of a sequel when I finished ‘Life Class.’ What changed my mind was the perception that the characters had a lot of life left in them, a lot of unresolved conflicts, and also I became interested in the Tonks pastel portraits of facially disfigured soldiers and in the whole area of facial reconstruction.
Patton was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn’t like that attitude.
No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.
When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.
‘Horse Soldiers’ is the untold story of how a small band of U.S. Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan in 2001, just five weeks after September 11, saddled up on horses, and rode to an improbable victory against a vastly larger Taliban and Al Qaeda army.
This is all about a media war that continues to rage between the old and new media. Unfortunately for our soldiers, these brave Americans are caught in the crossfire.
To me, serving wasn’t uncommon, and my service paled in comparison to so many of my friends who had done so much more. In my world – as a citizen soldier – I was surrounded by other soldiers just doing their jobs.
It wasn’t a new idea. During the war against the French we had this kind of broadcast for the French soldiers.
From the sea came a boat with some Israeli commando soldiers who took me by the commando boat to the yacht and put me on the yacht. In the yacht I asked people, who are you. And they said we are Israelis, French and British.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin they think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.
Soldiers of the American Revolution fought that 18th century war with heavy muskets. In the early 20th century, we kids fought it every Fourth of July not only with exploding powder and shimmering flares, but with all of our senses.
I grew up in a time when people believed in duty, honor and country. My grandfathers were both officers. My father was a General in the Air Force. My brother and I were both in the Army. I’ve always felt a kinship with soldiers; I think it’s possible to support the warrior and be against the war.
As soldiers need not only courage but tactics also, so does a philosopher need not only courage and philosophy but discernment also, to tell what his right time of dying is – so that he neither seek it nor flee it.
In the army, we do two things every day. We train our soldiers, and then we grow them into leaders, because frankly, we don’t hire out. We grow our own leaders.
China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.
When Soldiers serve, their families serve too.
I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors.
Before running for office, I was an A-10 squadron commander with 325 combat hours. During my time in uniform and since coming to the House and taking up the fight to keep the plane, I have heard countless stories from American soldiers about how the A-10 saved their lives.
We can guess that the unacceptable conduct of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib resulted in part from the dangerous state of affairs on the ground in a theater of war.
We held signs that said ‘Thank God For Dead Soldiers,’ ‘Thank God For IEDs.’
In combat operations in places like Afghanistan, we often confronted the specter of dangerous people with powerful weapons who were a threat to their community and to our soldiers. Our aim was to quickly determine who in that community was a legitimate actor who could be trusted with a firearm and who was not.
The brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once, at least, the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death’s deserters.
I’d like people to listen to our soldiers. They were there. They heard the alarms go off. They tasted the substance in the air. They spit up blood. They had rashes on their bodies. They got sick.
Soldiers, I intend to stay here, not only as long as a man remains, but as long as a piece of a man is left.
The day after the prison was transferred to the military intelligence command, they had an entire battalion – 1,200, 1,500 soldiers – arrive at Abu Ghraib just for force protection alone.
The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.
My father being a soldier, every time I saw soldiers marching – ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘my father’s that,’ and these soldiers were always looking magnificent. And I thought they were powerful; they were all-powerful. I knew that they were an elite in India.
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
The violence and burnings in Lebanon were the work of Syrian soldiers and workers dressed in civilian clothes.
We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory.
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
When I was in the Army, 100 percent of our effort was to really be sharp, and soldiers, we were under live fire all the time.
The enemy capture of female soldiers during a hot war will in fact provoke even greater than usual political pressure to quickly rescue them, if necessary overriding sounder but more time-consuming strategies.
As I recovered at Walter Reed, I worried about the soldiers who pulled me out of my helicopter that Friday afternoon. Would they make it back okay? And what about all the other soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen who were also putting their lives on the line every day?
No officer wants to be involved in a justified use of force proven unnecessary after the fact, any more than soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan wanted to make what proved to be the wrong decision in a shoot-don’t-shoot situation. Those decisions, even if justified, live with you forever, believe me.
In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.
It was my duty to shoot the enemy, and I don’t regret it. My regrets are for the people I couldn’t save: Marines, soldiers, buddies. I’m not naive, and I don’t romanticize war. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. But I can stand before God with a clear conscience about doing my job.
I’ve had songs written during the Falklands war, and during the first Gulf war I got letters from soldiers saying they were listening to these songs, like Island of no return.
For a long time, it was believed that war was waged by armies which could not be identified with the nation itself. Professional soldiers took upon themselves the job of defending national interests, and it was understood that the war affected only them; the country itself went on living and working.
Spending time with America’s soldiers is always inspiring.
I am also deeply concerned with the widespread, often undiagnosed, incidents of PTSD and the alarming suicide rates amongst our returning soldiers.
It’s this patronizing thing that people have about if you’re against the war, everyone’s lumped together. You know, the soldiers are not scholars; they’re not war experts.
