Quotes from Dave Grossman

Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat.

Do not expect the combat fairy to come bonk you with the combat wand and suddenly make you capable of doing things that you never rehearsed before. It will not happen.

When a man is frightened, he literally stops thinking with his forebrain (that is, with the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the midbrain (that is, with the portion of his brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of an animal), and in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win.

Gunpowder's superior noise, its superior posturing ability, made it ascendant on the battlefield.

It has been said that we only get one spin at life, but once in a while we may get another. What we do with it will determine whether or not it is deserved.

Whatever you drill for ahead of time will be there for you in combat. No more, no less. If you drill for specific verbal commands, then you dramatically increase the likelihood that at the moment of truth those commands will be available to you under stress.

Training At The Speed Of Life

El soldado entiende que hay veces cuando todos los otros han fallado y entonces tiene que «pagar la cuenta del carnicero» y luchar, sufrir, y morir para arreglar los errores de los políticos y cumplir la «voluntad del pueblo».

Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action combine to form one of the most basic, important, primal, and potentially traumatic occurrences of war.

In other words, the intentional miss can be a very subtle form of disobedience.

There is no shame in failure. For a warrior the only shame is in not trying.)

Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argues that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the "dark beauty of violence," and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it. —Thucydides

A tremendous volume of research indicates that the primary factor that motivates a soldier to do the things that no sane man wants to do in combat (that is, killing and dying) is not the force of self-preservation but a powerful sense of accountability to his comrades on the battlefield.

Despite our wonders and greatness, we are a society that has experienced so much social regression, so much decadence, in so short a period of time, that in many parts of America we have become the kind of place to which civilized countries used to send missionaries. - quoting William Bennett

Some psychiatric casualties have always been associated with war, but it was only in the twentieth century that our physical and logistical capability to sustain combat outstripped our psychological capacity to endure it.

Napoleon said, "The moment of greatest vulnerability is the instant immediately after victory.

There is strong evidence that there exists a genetic predisposition for aggression. In all species the best hunter, the best fighter, the most aggressive male, survives to pass his biological predispositions on to his descendants. There are also environmental processes that can fully develop this predisposition toward aggression; when we combine this genetic predisposition with environmental development we get a killer.

The basic response stages to killing in combat are concern about killing, the actual kill, exhilaration, remorse, and rationalization and acceptance.

The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. —Glenn Gray The Warriors

Robert Heinlein once wrote that fulfillment in life involved "loving a good woman and killing a bad man.

if a student ever states that he is dead, the right answer is, "No, you aren't dead! I don't give you permission to die. I don't train people to die. I train them to live!

You will likely hear participants say such things as, "So that's what you did?" "Oh, I forgot about that." "So, when you did that, that's when I did this. Now it makes sense." Like a jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered with pieces missing, it all begins to come together as everyone adds their one or two pieces.

seeing the elephant.