war

Death wins nothing here,gnawing wings that amputate___hen spread, lift up, fly.

It's always fallen to women to forge the peace between all these hot-blooded men, always ready to go to war at the slightest provocation....Why do men behave the way they do, warring?""What do you think?" he asked."Maybe because they've got no sense of grief?

To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who__ disappeared, I said over and over again: __veryone is dead._ If they insisted, showing me family photos, I__ calmly say: __ere there any children? Not a single child will come back._ I didn__ mince my words, I didn__ try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I__ become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people__ tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

It was "Boom Boom" Dupont who had ripped Kit out of the Humvee after the IED went off, the IED that turned the entire undercarriage of his truck into a fiery wall that consumed the five men inside.

There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.

Un país gana más con un año de paz que con diez de guerra.

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doorsMany a frozen night, and merrilyAnswered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:"At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush," said he,"I slept." None knew which bush. Above the town,Beyond `The Drover', a hundred spot the downIn Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleepsMore sound in France -that, too, he secret keeps.

We're all bits that the war didn't take, Flinty thought, gazing at the stranger's back. But those left behind had a right to know more about the beast who'd chewed their lives and spat the remnants out.

Live for your country, die to yourself; live for yourself, die to your country.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be buried an arm's length of dirt above his brother and whose bones would find over time those of his older brother, and so, at that indeterminate point in the future, answer his mother's prayer that her boys find each other, wherever they go; that younger brother would have a smile on his face and the silliest thought in his skull a minute before the first bullet would break it, thinking of how that day six months earlier, when they all went to have his older brother's portrait made, he should have had his made, too, because now his parents would have to make another trip, and he hoped they would, hoped they would because even if he knew his older brother's nose, he hadn't been prepared to see it, and seeing that nose, there, on the page, the density of loss it engendered, the unbelievable ache of loving and not having surrounded him, strong enough to toss him, as his brother had, into the summer lake, but there was nothing but air, and he'd believed that plummet was as close as they would ever come again, and with the first gunshot one brother fell within arms' reach of the other, and with the fifth shot the blindfold dissolved and the light it blocked became forever, and on the kitchen wall of his parents' house his portrait hangs within arm's reach of his older brother's, and his mother spends whole afternoons staring at them, praying that they find each other, wherever they go.

It__ important to have a buddy like that. Somebody who__l stop you from doing that really stupid thing you were gonna do just because you couldn__ think of anything better. -- unidentified soldier, eulogizing his dead buddy

This tune goes manly.Come, go we to the King. Our power is ready;Our lack is nothing but our leave. MacbethIs ripe for shaking, and the powers abovePut on their instruments. Receive what cheer you may.The night is long that never finds th

It was a tragic end to a heroic life.

Decades would pass. A few short sections would be formed in time into strangely resurrected, trunkless legs-tourist sites, sacred sites, national sites.For the line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only. And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

They Served...reliving memoriesthat will not diegiving their allfor you and I -friends takenlives shaken...

Regrettable was the gallantry of great men who risked themselves for others.

It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.It is psychotic to go.It is psychotic to look.Psychotic to live in a different country forever.Psychotic to lose something forever.The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever. Indeed, it makes the subsequent involuntary arrival a stressor for psychosis.