"I wasn't hit very badly — a piece of shrapnel went thru my helmet and cut a nice little hole in the back of my head. It didn't fracture the skull and is healed up nicely now. I don't know what happened to my helmet; the shell landed close to me and when I came to, the helmet was gone. The concussion together with the fragment that hit me must have broken the chinstrap and torn it off my head. It also blew my glasses off my face. I never saw them again, either, but I imagine they are smashed to hell. If I hadn't been lying in a hole I'd dug with my hands and helmet, that shell would probably have finished me off. The hole was only six or eight inches deep, but that makes an awful lot of difference, and it looked like a canyon."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 25
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Jones
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
James Jones
James Ramon Jones (6 November 1921 – 9 May 1977) was an American author, who became famous after the publication of his first novel, From Here to Eternity.
47 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by James Jones →
Related Quotes
"I write to reach eternity."
"It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and…"
"I want to make everybody in the world groan with the inevitability of sorrow."
"Colour makes a difference. Gender makes a difference. Ethnicity makes a difference. Acting as if they don't will crea…"
"When he finished packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands,…"
"Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that y…"
"Unofficially, nobody really minded the clap. It was a joke to those who had never had it and to those who had been ov…"
""A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is," she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quit…"
"Why was it everything was always so goddam complicated? Even the simplest things was so goddam complicated when you c…"
"This place is hell. They herd you around like cattle; they order you around like dogs; they work you like horses; and…"