Soldiers

"If you're going to get groups of men to risk their humanity, health, and lives in wars of offense, the traditional way is not to pay them a lot, but to addict them to the "cult of masculinity." You have to convince them they're not "real men" unless they kill and conquer."

"Living the grueling life of a warrior seemed, and still does seem, a very simple and uninteresting occupation, especially for someone of my unusually capable intellect, and I was very much opposed to having my life controlled by the crude brutality of the society into which I was thrust."

"The General: "Speaking of saints it puzzles me how so many soldiers could find a place on the same plane as monks and see their profession preferred to all peaceful, civilian professions if at all times war had been considered a necessary evil such as the liquor trade or perhaps something even worse. Evidently those Christian nations who recognize saints (not only the Russian ones but approximately also the others) have not only honored the military career but honored it in a very special manner; and of all professions it was the one which alone had the reputation of instructing its best representatives in the practice of sanctity. Such an opinion is contrary to the present movement against wars."

"First, it's important to note that rape and war didn't always go together. For instance, European colonists wrote astonished letters home about how "even these savages" -- by which they meant the residents of this continent they were invading -- didn't rape, not even their women prisoners. But those were wars of self-defense."

"Every soldier in every army is taught first off to be neat and clean, to keep his clothes in good repair, his buttons sewed on and his shoes polished, his face and hands and body washed, his beard shaved. He is respectful to his officers and stands at attention when he is addressed; he moves with precision about his business, walking as a soldier should, head up, chin in, arms at his sides."

"The sun beat upon our heads and we lay there wondering what was going on in our particular sector, what was the significance of the intermittent firing, whether we were advancing or holding our own. For to the average soldier battle always remains a chaos and an impression of immense confusion; he has only a worm's-eye view of the affair; he has no way of knowing what it's all about. One minute he is advancing under fire; the next he is lying low; the next withdrawing. He receives definite orders and they are immediately countermanded; he rarely sees the enemy and the fire that is directed at him assumes astonishing impersonality, as though it were independent of any human agency."

"Ay me! what perils do environ The man that meddles with cold iron!"

"Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylæ!"

"His breast with wounds unnumber'd riven, His back to earth, his face to heaven."

"When the final taps is sounded and we lay aside life's cares, And we do the last and glories parade, on Heaven's shining stairs, And the angels bid us welcome and the harps begin to play, We can draw a million canteen checks and spend them in a day, It is then we'll hear St. Peter tell us loudly with a yell, "Take a front seat you soldier men, you've done your hitch in Hell.""

"For the army is a school in which the miser becomes generous, and the generous prodigal; miserly soldiers are like monsters, but very rarely seen."

"Wolverine: I'm the best there is at what I do. But what I do best isn't very nice."

"You cannot make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers, the day you make a soldier of them, is the beginning of the end of the revolution. And if slaves seem good soldiers, than our whole theory of slavery is wrong."

"They're saps! because they risk their lives for strangers."

"For the helmsman is recognized in the tempest; in the warfare the soldier is proved."

"Make every private Sentinel, every Musquetier, both Judge, Jury, and Executioner."

"We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness."

"The primary intent of physical standards in the military has always been to select soldiers best suited to the physical demands of military service. This standard has usually meant the selection of soldiers who at least looked as though they could carry loads and fight well."

"Some physical standards have changed easily with the need for soldiers, which suggests that what may be portrayed as a soldierly characteristic may not be solidly rooted in combat necessity. Height is an example. European monarchs prided themselves on their tall soldiers; it was also convenient to have men of about the same height for drill and ceremony. Some eugenicists claimed that criminals tended to be shorter than the rest of the population (Baxter, 1875), and a retired military surgeon proposed that physical characteristics could identify future heroes (Foster et al., 1967)."

"In the frontispiece to their book on human physique, Sheldon et al. (1940) showed photographs of three extremes of somatotype: an endomorph, who was characterized by pendulous fat deposits; a mesomorph, who looked well proportioned and muscular; and an ectomorph, who looked like a victim of anorexia nervosa. There can be little argument about which of these three types would make a suitable soldier. Without question, the massively obese endomorph would be unable to perform physically, would fail even the most subjectively lenient standards of military appearance, would likely encounter acute as well as long-term health problems as a direct consequence of excess fat, and would suffer miserably with work in even a moderately hot environment. At the other extreme of size, the ectomorph would be unable to carry a normal load on a standard road march task, would likely suffer health problems from extreme deficiency of muscle mass, and would be unable to effectively thermoregulate in a cold environment. The current Army body composition standards ignore the ectomorph, because this soldier is undetected by the height-weight screening tables, even when the soldier is so deficient in fat-free mass that relative body fat is high. This omission is a change from the earlier standards, which emphasized the exclusion of physically weak individuals who would have difficultly with basic soldier tasks. At the upper end, the endomorph is clearly excluded by current Army standards, as are many individuals who may even approach the mesomorph in appearance and physical capabilities. Thus, the second change from previous standards is that current body fat standards draw a precise line, without confidence intervals, for acceptable fatness; these standards take into account neither the strength of the association between body fat and military performance nor the reliability of the method of estimation. Previously, a physician made the final subjective determination that a soldier was unsuited to the Army because of his or her obesity, but this was subjective and had little impact on offenders of military appearance. Without this buffer, the arbitrary standards have had a major impact. Thus, it becomes more important to test and carefully adjust body composition standards to performance end points to ensure that good soldiers are not eliminated."

"With a soldier the flag is paramount."

"Inquiry shall likewise be made about the professions and trades of those who are brought to be admitted to the [Christian] faith. ... A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath; if he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected. ... If a catechumen or a believer seeks to become a soldier, they must be rejected, for they have despised God."

"And though ten out of twelve had fallen, still the last two, sure as death, were to be bound on the first evening of rest over the bottle, drinking a silent health to their death companions, talking and laughing over all they had been through. For dangers past - an old soldier laughs. For those to come - a full glass, though death and the devil grinn there, as long as the wine was good. Such has ever been the custom of war."

"When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world, soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous."

"The use of children as soldiers in armed conflict is among the most morally repugnant practices in the world, as illustrated by this Los Angeles Times photo essay. Children are combatants in nearly three-quarters of the world’s conflicts and have posed difficult dilemmas for the professional armies they confront, including the United States’."

"Approximately 300,000 children are believed to be combatants in some thirty conflicts worldwide. Nearly half a million additional children serve in armies not currently at war, such that 40 percent of the world’s armed organizations have children in their ranks."

"Soldiers are not as other men – that is the lesson that I have learned from a life cast among warriors. The lesson has taught me to view with extreme suspicion all theories and representations of war that equate it with any other activity in human affairs. War undoubtedly connects, as the theorists demonstrate, with economics and diplomacy and politics. Connection does not amount to identity or even similarity. War is wholly unlike diplomacy or politics because it must be fought by men whose values and skills are not those of politicians and diplomats. They are those of a world apart, a very ancient world, which exists in parallel with the everyday world but does not belong to it. Both worlds change over time, and the warrior world adapts in step to the civilian. It follows it, however, at a distance. The distance can never be closed, for the culture of the warrior can never be that of civilization itself. All civilisations owe their origins to the warrior; their cultures nurture the warriors who defend them, and the differences between them will make those of one very different in externals from those of another. It is, indeed, a theme of this book that in externals there are three distinct warrior traditions. Ultimately, however, there is only one warrior culture. Its evolution and transformation over time and place, from man’s beginnings to his arrival in the contemporary world, is the history of warfare."

"Since as a rule only the king could afford to hire mercenaries in bulk they strengthened both King and nobles against the people with whom they had no ties or sympathy. While much more expensive than native troops, they left no troublesome widows and orphans; and at the end of the campaign they could be sent away unlike a country's own men coming home from the wars."

"The development of an international legal framework to control the use of mercenaries started in the 1960's. At that time, the United Nations became concerned that the use of foreign mercenary forces could prevent and hinder the right to self-determination of peoples under colonial domination. What developed at the international level was a recognition that mercenary activities were an affront to the principles of sovereign equality, political independence and territorial integrity of states."

"I'm supposed to be a soldier who never blows his composure, even though I hold the weight of the whole world on my shoulders."

"A dead soldier ties down no personnel behind the lines. A maimed soldier requires on average 40 personnel in the medevac chain."

"Step by step. Heart to heart. Left, right, left. We all fall down, like toy soldiers. Bit by bit torn apart, we never win, but the battle wages on for toy soldiers."

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."

"Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out."

"[R]esearch has provided evidence that combat exposure is associated with aggression and violent behavior, with various studies finding that violent combat experience predicts risk-taking behaviors, criminal behavior, and physical aggression with a significant other (MacManus et al., 2015)."

"It is vital... to establish facilities for providing sexual comfort [to the soldiers] as soon as possible."

"Most who join the military and go to war are young—18, 19 years old—and many have never been away from home. They have little experience of the world, let alone war, death, and killing. For them, and for all soldiers, combat is a complex mix of emotions that define the experience of war and shape the experience of coming home."

"Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your fathers? Our fathers are Russian commanders, that's what our fathers are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your mothers? Our mothers are white tents, that's what our mothers are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your sisters? Our sisters are our sharp sabres and pikes, that's what our sisters are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your wives? Our wives are our loaded guns, that's what our wives are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your children? Our children are our well-aimed bullets, that's what our children are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your aunts? Our aunts are our ripped soles, that's what our aunts are. Soldiers, you brave guys, who are your grandfathers? Our grandfathers are glorious victories, that's what our grandfathers are. Soldiers, you brave guys, what is your glory? Our glory is Russian state, that's what our glory is."

"Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth."

"Arm'd at point exactly, cap-à-pie."

"I thought upon one pair of English legs Did march three Frenchmen."

"Give them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils."

"I am a soldier and unapt to weep Or to exclaim on fortune's fickleness."

"I said an elder soldier, not a better. Did I say, better?"

"Fie, my Lord, fie! a soldier, and afear'd?"

"Blow, wind! come, wrack! At least we'll die with harness on our back."

"God's soldier be he! Had I as many sons as I have hairs, I would not wish them to a fairer death: And so his knell is knoll'd."

"He is a soldier fit to stand by Cæsar And give direction."

"Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five fathom deep, and then anon Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes."

"When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of folks in this room have seen many times over and you're strong and you can handle it but a lot of people can't handle it. They see horror stories, they see events you couldn't see in a movie, nobody would believe it."