14 Quotes by Clint Van Winkle

War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can’t feel it, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention, you are probably dead anyway.

No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me.

the shooting and killing weren’t as black-and-white as most people think. The actions live in that hazy area of blown-apart stone walls and hesitations. Sometimes I shot when I shouldn’t have; other times I didn’t shoot when I should have. There was no way to explain why I did either. Everything happened so fast. Decisions had to be made. After I got home I began to see things in slow motion, see the actions that might’ve been mistakes.

I was enjoying the great human trophy hunt and, looking back, it scares the hell out of me

Unfortunately, just like bullets, you can never get words back once they have been sent out into the world.

Who supports the troops? The troops support the troops.

I wanted to see my family, but didn't want to leave the other guys. The people waiting for us were strangers, even though I knew every last one of them.

Peace surfaced here. Hard to imagine a person finding peace through war, but no one finds peace in war—peace finds you. It crawls into your sleeping bag and helps you fall asleep, nudges your arm, tells you to turn over, think about home.

Everyone acted like they knew so much about the war. But none of them really knew anything besides what they had learned through Internet searches or shady half-truths political pundits spouted from the comfort of their news desks. Nothing could ever be flushed out because nobody bothered to ask the troops or look at both sides of the story.