Quotes from Dave Grossman

Stress acclimatization is about measuring precise doses of stress followed by waves of recovery and then repeating these cycles very specifically. There must be time for adaptation to take place and there must be enough training, repeated over time, to help it stick as well as reinforcing the conditioning.

Douglas MacArthur said it well: "However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.

When learning skills and ingraining them as muscle memory or autopilot responses, it is important that only one way be taught. W.E. Hicks' 1952 study found that as the possible responses increased from one to two, reaction time increased by 58 percent.

I am sick and tired of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. —William Tecumseh Sherman

And in that state of nature, no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. —Thomas Hobbes

As the Duke of Wellington put it, "No man fears to do that which he knows he does well.

Thus, a simple set of skills, combined with an emphasis on actions requiring complex and gross motor muscle operations (as opposed to fine-motor control), all extensively rehearsed, allows for extraordinary performance levels under stress.

At the end of the day when you go home and hug your loved ones and taste that meal prepared with love, it will have a flavor the protected will never know. The sheep spend a lifetime eating grass, but you taste the flavor the protected will never know. That may be the warrior's greatest reward.

Soldiers Promise)

Brasidas of Sparta said that, "Fear makes men forget, and skill that cannot fight is useless.

Epictetus, stated it well when he wrote, "It is not the thing itself, but the view we take of it which distresses us.

a bold act may prove to be a blunder. Nonetheless, it is a laudable error, not to be regarded on the same footing as others. Happy is the army where ill-timed boldness occurs frequently; it is a luxuriant weed, but indicates richness in the soil.

killing the grunts of North Vietnam, the grunts of America had killed a part of themselves.

in killing the grunts of North Vietnam, the grunts of America had killed a part of themselves.

The Gift of Fear, which

After the Echo

The Gift of Fear)

Awareness is good, but without skills and ability tied to that awareness, all you have is anxiety. —Tony Blauer

Warriors have a moral obligation to protect society and it's citizens. Individuals who refuse to participate in realistic training should not be in the business.

Create an environment in which your people want to train and be inoculated. Do not kill your warriors. Do not send losers off the training site. Do not talk trash about your students. Punish in private, praise in public.

What goes on around you … compares little with what goes on inside you. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can we teach our officers to shoot too well? I don't think so. If we trained our officers in first aid, and everyone they treated survived, did we train them too well? If we trained our officers in driving, and they never had anymore accidents, did we train them too well? If someone must die in an armed encounter, let it be the subject who is initiating the hostile action, and not another officer.

Any man who is a man may not, in honor, submit to threats of violence. But many men who are not cowards are simply unprepared for the fact of human savagery. They have not thought about it (incredible as this may appear to anyone who reads the papers or listens to the news) and they just don't know what to do. When they look right into the face of depravity or violence they are astonished and confounded.

Awareness is good, but without skills and ability tied to that awareness, all you have is anxiety.