Best 168 quotes in «combat quotes» category

Gun up,' he whispered to Skosh. The word went back to invisible kids lying on the jungle floor. 'Set it in here,' Mellas whispered to Conman. 'Put Vancouver with his machine gun one-eighty from it.' 'He won't like it.' 'To hell with him. Send a fire team around to the left. We'll cover with Mole if they get into the shit. Who do you want to go?' Now it was Conman's turn to play God, at age nineteen. He shut his eyes. 'Rider.' So some are chosen to die young.

For those regarded as warriors... When engaged in combat, the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat.

He's nineteen, one of our baby-wipe killers, and all he's killed so far in the Corps has been paper.

I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded. Victory has no charms for men when purchased at such cost.

Fighting physically signifies spiritual weakness.

If he chooses combat I'll wipe that arrogant sneer off his face the first chance I get.

I could smell the Viet Cong, really, I could smell Charlie. It wasn’t just his body sweat or the urine. There were times when I could hear the breathing, real quiet; you could hear a person breathe, and I’d know he was in there, and I didn’t go any farther. I just said to myself: In this dark corner of a tunnel is where the animal belongs, a rodent belongs. I’m becoming like a rodent, but still I don’t belong. Yes, I could smell Charlie. And he knew me. The type of cologne I used, the aftershave—that’s when we stopped using it altogether. But there was more than that. There was the scent that told you there was somebody in the tunnels. We became so tuned up after a while that when the other person would flick an eyelid up or down, you really knew he was there, in the corner, not even hiding anymore. Just sitting and waiting. They were the ones you never killed. You just backed out and told them up above the tunnel was cold.

I came to think of it as a kind of zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up.

I left a piece of my soul that will always rightfully belong in the desert.

In combat - do something, you might die. Do nothing, and you will die!

I miss it: the smell of sand, sweat, and gunpowder, rings of salt from dried sweat on my pants’ legs, and around my waist just under where my armor sits.

I put 3rd Fire Team in reserve, as usual. They're Malrosio's, and he's dumber than Fabio on two bottles of NyQuil.

I put 1st Fire Team in support. Corporal Moore's team. Moore's a bit of a motard, always thinks his fire team should be main effort, like it's a fucking prize. He could be less oo-rah, but he's good to go.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

In the midst of combat, we learned a great deal about mankind and its many different races, creeds and beliefs.

It is the man on the ground with his rifle who ultimately wins the war.

It should surprise no one that modern soldiers return home just as conflicted and detached as previous generations. The difference is that in the age of vapid American decadence, their simpler fundamental values are largely irrelevant to we civilians.

Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it.

It is a tragedy, at rate at which EBOLA VIRUS is spreading in West Africa. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.

. . . most martial artists want to know how A technique is done, A seasoned Sensei will demonstrate why

Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan I’d been on combat missions. 217 days. And I’m still paying the price for every one of those days.

Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier…Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and brave. And they were here on this road, a point moving along in a line in the vast neutral spaces of the jungle. And somewhere else a battle might be going on. The artillery, the small-arms fire they had been hearing constantly, might be nothing, something scattered along the front, or it might be all concentrated now in the minuscule inferno of combat. None of it matched. The night had broken them into all the isolated units that actually they were.

Patience and Forgiveness are at the heart of A warrior's success, they help engender necessary intervals of space and time to evaluate difficult encounters.

Many will argue that there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat. Consider this. Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one's own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people's lives above one's own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, ummah, or church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell. Whether combat is the dark side of the same version, or only something equivalent in intensity, I simply don't know. I do know that at the age of fifteen I had a mystical experience that scared the hell out of me and both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity. Most of us, including me, would prefer to think of a sacred space as some light-filled wonderous place where we can feel good and find a way to shore up our psyches against death. We don't want to think that something as ugly and brutal as combat could be involved in any way with the spiritual. However, would any practicing Christian say that Calvary Hill was not a sacred space?

Nothing will hold you back because you expect the unexpected. With a clear vision for your life, you are better prepared to combat any opposition.

Patriotism is the primary moral armor of our ground combatants.

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each other, as though we were involved in some kind of enemy combat, rather than the work of statesmanship.

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals.

PTSD is curable when one realises how the unconscious mind works and that the symptoms of PTSD are actually the unconscious mind attempting to protect the person experiencing them. With the right therapies it is possible to take a person with extreme PTSD and help them to neutralise all their painful memories and emotions permanently.

Raising the sword aloft is sometimes the only way to make the other side stand down.

Red had a deep loathing of the night before them. He had been through so much combat, had felt so many kinds of terror, and had seen so many men killed that he no longer had any illusions about the inviolability of his own flesh. He knew he could be killed; it was something he had accepted long ago, and he had grown a shell about that knowledge so that he rarely thought of anything further ahead than the next few minutes…

So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed.

Sure, military combat is scary... but in some ways combat seems a little easier than personal relationships. At least in combat, the enemy is honest enough to claim themselves as such.

The devil depends on a dark secret chance, but God does it now before your own eyes.

...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.

So few people were left who knew what combat was like. People were so easy to frighten. Combat taught a man what to fear – and what to ignore.

Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography—you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up—is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

The inner fight never does any dead. (Le combat intérieur - Ne fait jamais de mort)

The other boys started to complain that pushing off walls was movement, not combat. "There is no combat without movement," Ender said.

The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.

The purpose of Karate is to guide you out of trouble by any means necessary, both in actual combat and in life

The rate spread of EBOLA VIRUS in West Africa, is big tragedy. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens of African can help prevent the spread. International cooperation is urgently needed to combat the EBOLA virus.

The razor hung between his shoulder-blades from a loop of cotton string round his neck inside his shirt. The same motion of the hand which brought the razor forward over his shoulder flipped the blade open and freed it from the cord, the blade opening on until the back edge of it lay across the knuckles of his fist, his thumb pressing the handle into his closing fingers, so that in the second before the half-drawn pistol exploded he actually struck at the white man's throat not with the blade but with a sweeping blow of his fist, following through in the same motion so that not even the first jet of blood touched his hand or arm.

. . . there are two types of fighters, the former strike all over the place hoping one would land, the latter, assured of their prowess and capabilities, hit once and destroy the opponent's desire to continue the fight

There are two things a combat deployment offers which all of us strongly desire. The first, being purpose. Every morning we woke up and knew why we were there. It is immediate and unavoidable. Although, it is extreme and unpleasant, there is a comfort in that purpose. The second, is simplicity. We have one goal. There are relatively simple rules on how to accomplish it, and we understand that just about everything will go wrong. Pretty simple.

The glamorous side is all they want to hear, the real part of war isn’t believed or [is] listened to with a bored feeling, such as: the constant waiting, baking in the sun all day the flies all day & the mosquitoes all night, the hr. on & hr. off all night, the rain & shivering all night, the thirst & the same canned ration all the time till it becomes tasteless paste that you spit out, the always incomplete “word” never being told what the situation is. Furthermore an admission of fear is either regarded as weakness or modesty in a combat veteran. They don’t realize that without fear there can be no courage.

Therefore the clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

The warrior guided by the spirit serves humanity, the warrior without, serves the ego