#army

In that moment, I understand the way that the noblest yearning for duty and sacrifice can be mixed up with all that is savage and shameful, like in the Bible, where a just and merciful God tells you to kill everyone, kill the children, kill the livestock, kill John Polling, leave nothing alive to sully this pure and just world. Except when it's all done you find out that wasn't really God after all, just some politician, or maybe it was God, but he taps you on the shoulder and says, 'No, dude, that isn't what I meant,' and leaves you sitting in a Dairy Queen in Bothell with blood on your hands and no further orders... ↗

— Stuart Archer Cohen

#experience #faith #god #hope-lost #lando

The finishing off of the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Luftwaffe. ↗

— Franz Halder

#enemy #finishing #left #luftwaffe #off

My biological mother made my clothes or bought my clothes from Salvation Army or Goodwill. ↗

— Tonya Harding

#biological #bought #clothes #goodwill #made

A whole army, though they can neither write nor read, are not afraid of a platform, which they know is but earth or stone; nor of a cannon, which, without a hand to give fire to it, is but cold iron; therefore a whole army is afraid of one man. ↗

— James Harrington

#army #cannon #cold #cold iron #earth

Anyone who says they don't enjoy the Army is mad - you can spend a week hating it and the next week it could be the best thing in the world and the best job you could ever, ever wish for. It has got so much to offer. ↗

— Prince Harry

#army #best #could #enjoy #ever

Ataturk sent several Turkish staff officers to Afghanistan, helped them build their own army. ↗

— Bulent Ecevit

#army #build #helped #officers #own

One doesn't become a soldier in a week - it takes training, study and discipline. There is no question that the finest Army in the world is found in the United States. ↗

— Daniel Inouye

#become #discipline #finest #found #question

The American Army has supplied, assigned a very capable man to me, to help me, bring me to military justice. I don't think I need no civilians. All I want to do is clear myself with the American Army. ↗

— Robert Jenkins

#american #army #assigned #bring #capable

It is tragic that the Fuehrer should have the whole nation behind him with the single exception of the Army generals. In my opinion it is only by action that they can now atone for their faults of lack of character and discipline. ↗

— Alfred Jodl

#army #atone #behind #character #discipline

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#camus #communism #czechoslovakia #david-szmulevski #east-germany