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Reflections from VeteransWhat is war like? Over the years I have come to understand that among military veterans, we can find a deep longing for peace. Many combat veterans, in addition to physical wounds, carry painful images and memories which haunt their minds for decades. Out of this pain, comes the search for a peaceful world. The reflections below stand in contrast to the words and images in military recruitment brochures, because they speak openly of death, fear and loneliness. These words come from veterans who stand on the other side of military recruitment. In the interest of honesty, their words must be placed alongside the stirring calls to discipline, honor, leadership and courage. Titus Peachey
War is a very strange predicament because it goes contrary to everything that civilized human beings are taught... in the society that we grow up in you're taught not to kill. We're taught not to steal. We're taught certain ethics. War is something different, because in war you have to kill. It's self preservation. It's survival. It's real tough to put in those terms. On the other end of my sights is going to be someone, a person, someone else with a family that I will probably have to kill in order to complete my mission. Once the bullets start flying at me, some self-instinct is going to turn in me that's saying if I want to get out of here I have to shoot back, and unfortunately that means probably having to kill somebody.... I'm going to push all the civilized person inside of me saying "don't kill" back somewhere, and do what I have to do to get out of here. 1st Lieutenant Favio Lopez
I did what I had to do in Vietnam because I was a soldier. I did what I did because I was scared and I didn't want to die. And I did it because I was ordered to do it, not because I liked doing it. Some of my friends didn't make it back, and sometimes I feel like they were the lucky ones. Because since I've been back I've been living a life in hell. I haven't been able to find myself. I don't have an identity. I've been married three times, and I have six kids. But I never gave them anything but material things. I never gave myself because I didn't have a self to give. I don't have a person to give them. What they have is a shell of a person. James Burks
It's easier if you catch them young. You can train older men to be soldiers; its done in every major war. But you can never get them to believe that they like it, which is the major reason armies try to get their recruits before they are twenty.... The armed forces of every country can take almost any young male civilian and turn him into a soldier with all the right reflexes and attitudes in only a few weeks. Gwynne Dyer
It was in the staging area to Laos. When we came back from there, there was a small little airfield that had a hangar on it, so it must have been somewhere between Khe Sanh and Dong Ha.... I was really tired, and I went into this little hangar type building... that small aircraft were parked around. I was looking for a place to lie down out of the sun and sleep. I went to sleep on the dirt there, and I slept for awhile. I was vaguely aware when I was sleeping of people moving around me.... I thought other people were also lying down and going to sleep around me. And when I woke up, I was surrounded by bodies.... I think there was an assumption that I was a body and somebody was looking for a place to put some of the bodies, and they laid bodies alongside of me. That came back to me sometimes in dreams. That was one kind of recurrent psychic trauma rather than physical trauma. Dennis Boyer
The enemy here is very barbarous and many comrades have been killed and lain down to sleep forever. Last week three members of our squad were buried by the Americans' B-52s. We did not know they were above us until the bombs burst around us; I was lucky to crawl into my bunker in time and only suffered a bloody nose from the concussion. My right ear still rings from the noise. Now I feel death very near whenever I see an airplane coming through the clouds. This terrible war makes so many strange thoughts race through my head. I would like to jump straight up for thousands of miles to get away from here, from this killing. Before, I did not know what it was to kill a man; now that I have seen it, I don't want to do it any more. But it is the duty of a soldier to die for his country, me for our fatherland, the enemy for his. There is no choice. from the diary of an unknown North Vietnamese soldier, 1965
I saw a lot of battles. I can't even remember my first firefight, there were so many. After a while, you get used to it. They attack you, and people die, and it's a normal thing. You fight and kill people and wound people, and it seems normal. After a while, the people who've been with you for a month, two months--suddenly they're getting killed or messed up. But the worst thing is the fear that grabs you. A horrible fear that won't let you sleep. You can't concentrate. The slightest noise, and you open fire. And since you can't sleep, you don't do anything but think. You have daydreams about your family, your house, your friends. The people you left back home. And you cry at night when you're on guard and nobody can see you. You cry for the suffering, the pain, and for the fear that invades you because you don't know when you're going to die. By now you have it in your head that they're going to kill you. You just don't know when. You see other people die, and you think you're going to die, too. The terror goes with you all the time. Angel Quintana
I remember one incident where we were hovering near a road. We were picking up blivets of fuel. Our rotor wash blew a kid into the rear wheels of a five-ton truck. He got squooshed. I watched this, and my gut reaction was one of horror. I looked toward the ass end of the ship, and my flight engineer had been watching the same thing. We looked at each other in the same way, and then all of a sudden we both changed and started to laugh about it. Ah, we got another gook. We saw a certain humaneness in each other, and in ourselves, and quickly squashed it, because that was dangerous. To open up, to have that kind of crack in the armor, was a one-way ticket to either insanity or death or something. In order to get through, you built this shell and you existed in it. It had certain rules that you obeyed, and one of them was an indifference and arrogance toward the population. Jim Duffy
I remember one soldier said to me, "I don't want a woman seeing me die. I don't want it. That's why you shouldn't be here. It's not something women should be seeing. War is a man's business." That's the whole idea. What they were saying was, We're here to protect our country and defend our women and children. We've got to stop the Commies here because otherwise they'll be in Hawaii. We're here so our women and children will never have to see war on their own shores. But they were also saying, I don't want you to see me scared. I don't want you to see me cry the way I cry. I don't want you to see me bleed the way I bleed. And I don't want you to see me kill the way I like to kill. Jurate Kazickas
I don't think anything can prepare you to actually be confronted with violence, at least it doesn't seem that way to me. Nothing in the training that I was exposed to other than they can simulate the noise level somewhat but they can't simulate the chaos and the confusion of it. And just even the stark realization when you shift from something that you know that is not real to something that is real in a very, very ugly way there is no way training can prepare you for that. Often it is in the dark or in heavy vegetation. You can't see what is going on. Most of the times I was in places where there was shooting going on... I had no clue where the rest of my side was. It was often in the dark so all I'm seeing is points of light, unsure of which ones are supposedly my side and which ones are the other side. So there is a lot of fear and trepidation that comes just because you are unsure what is happening.... It is totally beyond your control.... There is no way you can get it to stop.... It is going to run its course, and when it is over possibly people are going to be dead.... I saw things that... really broke the spirit of people because... when someone would think the enemy was nearby and it would set off a panic and there would be a whole bunch of shooting and hundreds of rounds would be fired, thousands of rounds sometimes.... And then someone would... call for the firing to stop and discipline would be restored and they would send the point person ahead and they would discover some 12-year-old boy on the trail dead... or a water buffalo or something like that. There were times when this broke out for no reason at all. It was because people were on edge. Dennis Boyer
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