Quotes from Anthony Swofford

My despair is less despair than boredom and loneliness.

If while alive you hurt or disappoint people you love, there's no use continuing such behavior when you're dead.

I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one held a gun to your head. This is true, but because I signed the contract and fulfilled my obligation to fight one of America's wars, I am entitled to speak, to say, I belong to a fucked situation.

Every war is different. Every war is the same.

It occured to me that we will never be young again.

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 son's die horribly. This will never end. Sorry.

It dosnt matter how many mr. and mrs. johnsons are anti war- the actuall killers who know how to use the weapons are not.

My combat action has commenced... I've pissed my pants, but only a little.

Was your old man in the war?" "He was in the air force. He built runways." "The fucking air farce. He ever tell you about it? Did he live?" "Yes, he lived. He spoke once about Vietnam." "If he only spoke about it once, he wasn't lying.

When you fail, you disgrace yourself and others. When you succeed, be proud and others will be proud for you.

There was no such thing as a private life, all lives were public.

I like to fuck a lot and drop acid becomes one of our rallying cries, better than any Ohh-rah or Semper fi.

If wars were fought only by the men on the ground, the men facing one another in real battle, most wars would end quickly and sensibly. Men are smart and men are animals, in that they don't want to die so simply for so little.

And as a young man raised on the films of the Vietnam War, I want ammunition and alcohol and dope, I want to screw some whores and kill some Iraqi motherfuckers.