Jarhead : A Marine's Chronicle Of The Gulf War And Other Battles Quotes
"The Desert will become the popular moniker of Operation Desert Shield and the forthcoming Desert Storm, the Gulf War, the Operation to Free Kuwait—whatever else the war, the mass staging and movement of personnel and weapons of destruction might be called, it is the Desert."
"I remember some of the sand, but there was so much of it, I should be forgiven."
"I remember about myself a loneliness and poverty of spirit; mental collapse; brief jovial moments after weeks of exhaustion; discomfiting bodily pain; constant ringing in my ears; sleeplessness and drunkenness and desperation; fits of rage and despondency; mutiny of the self."
"We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion."
"The magic brutality of the films celebrates the terrible and despicable beauty of their fighting skills."
"Like most good and great marines, I hated the Corps."
"The grunt dies for nothing, for fifteen thousand poorly placed rounds; the sniper dies for that one perfect shot."
"The term sniper was first applied to a rifleman during the eighteenth century by British army personnel serving in India."
"The fundamental work of a sniper is rather simple: Go to this spot, shoot these personnel, extract yourself."
"In the Marine Corps environment, one of cause and effect, the first pragmatic principle we learn as children. When red, the stove is hot. When you fail, you disgrace yourself and others. When you succeed, be proud and others will be proud for you."
"It didn’t matter that I was a line grunt for sixty more days, I thought of myself differently already, and so did my line platoon peers."
"We are soldiers for the vast fortunes of others."
"For most jarheads, such propaganda works. Any grunt in his right mind will do anything for a hot shower and a rack."
"The truth about cheating jarheads is for the women to tell, and I’ve never heard those stories, told in America while the jarhead floats at sea or walks the Desert."
"It’s most desirable to serve under the number one ass-kissing sergeant."
"The loss of Dettmann won’t be a loss, but an inconvenience, a little bloody mess."
"I know this is crazy and reckless, but I think Dettmann might learn something, I don’t know what."
"You must forget who you were before the Marine Corps. You must also forget the person you might be in the future, after leaving the Marine Corps, because when war comes, you might die and then all of your fantasies and predictions for the future will have become lies."
"The importance of a war is never decided within years and certainly not within months, but rather in decades, or even centuries."
"The problem with believing your country’s battle monuments and deaths are more important than those of other nations is that the enemy disappears."
"The warrior celebrates the fact of having survived, not of killing."
"The received understanding of war changes so that the heroes from one’s own country are no longer believed to have fought against a national enemy but simply with other heroes."
"The man fires a rifle for many years, and he goes to war, and afterward he turns the rifle in at the armory and he believes he’s finished with the rifle. But no matter what else he might do with his hands—love a woman, build a house, change his son’s diaper—his hands remember the rifle."
"The warrior always fights for a sorry cause."
"You must remember that you are always a target."
"By air, land, and sea! From the halls of Montezuma!"
"The simple domesticity of the Marine Corps is seductive and dangerous."
"War is about revenge, war is about killing others who have killed and maimed you."
"The most effective psychological weapon on the battlefield is the nuclear bomb."
"The opposite of this assertion seems true when one considers the high number of fiercely religious military people, but they are missing something. They’re forgetting the mission of the military: to extinguish the lives and livelihood of other humans."
"The Corps forgives your drunkenness and stupidity. The Corps encourages your brutality."
"I tap the dog tag laced into my left boot, and I reach into my blouse and retrieve the multiple tags—they are icons, really—hanging from my neck."
"You either have a religion of record, or they stamp NO PREFERENCE on your tag, but this still makes it sound as though you want something."
"Eventually I realized that I enjoyed ordering new sets of dog tags, and that it didn’t matter to me what they listed on the religion line, I didn’t care."
"New dog tags afford the marine the opportunity to replace or reassign an old set."
"The comfort of dog tags is surrounding yourself with and disbursing so many pairs that there is no way you could possibly die."
"I’m a soldier, in a 'conflict.' A 'conflict' is much easier for the American public to swallow than a war."
"A half million troops are deployed to Saudi Arabia, more than enough to start the fight."
"I think, You are afraid of dying, I say aloud, 'Do not die now'."
"We are history making. Whether I live or die, the United States will win this war."
"I will not be surprised if Cortes sits down during the next water break and refuses to continue."
"I am one of a few thousand people who will walk this valley today. I am history making."
"I want to tell my mother that I love her and I thank her for my stern upbringing."
"By joining the Marine Corps and excelling within the severely disciplined enlisted ranks, I would prove both my manhood and the masculinity of the line."
"We are fighting ourselves but we can’t shoot back."
"I’ve never seen such destruction. The scene is too real not to be real."
"The distance between the living and the dead is too immense to breach."
"The dead Iraqis are poor company, but the presence of so much death reminds me that I’m alive, whatever awaits me to the north."
"We can also hear the fires, and they sound like the echoes from extinct beasts bellowing to reenter the living world."
"The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes, a billet to Airborne School—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke."
"It took years for you to understand that the most complex and dangerous conflicts, the most harrowing operations, and the most deadly wars, occur in the head."
"Some wars are unavoidable and need well be fought, but this doesn’t erase warfare’s waste. Sorry, we must say to the mothers whose sons will die horribly. This will never end. Sorry."
"I am entitled to despair over the likelihood of further atrocities. Indolence and cowardice do not drive me—despair drives me."
"Now I often think of the first time I received artillery fire, and the subsequent obliteration of the enemy observation post."
"I’ve missed riding five-tons, something I haven’t done since joining STA Platoon because we use Humvees."