27 Quotes by M.B. Dallocchio

There are people who come home from war and want to talk about the pain, but no one wants to listen; there are others who want to keep silent and repress the memories, and all their family and friends want is to talk about it. I call this the war veteran reintegration paradox.

Everyone around me was allowed, permitted to fall apart; yet I had to think twice. I couldn't bear to take another dip into an ocean of solitude for another taste of ostracization. I felt I would die.

Adversity has the remarkable ability of introducing the real you to yourself.

A wave of saudade swept over me as I realized home never existed at all. The concept of home felt far from my reach, and I felt sick with longing.

Home.” This was my mantra, my four-letter savior.

Veterans being sent into unjust wars for corporate profit is a perversion of trust, at best. I found the emotional manipulation of both sides, the propaganda at play so incredibly revolting that I couldn't stand to idly wave a flag or flaunt yellow ribbons without asking serious questions regarding motive.

It was a frightening metaphor for what the United States was becoming – a Titanic of rich, proud dimwits heading for the iceberg of anti-colonialist backlash.

There were waves of genocide that overcame indigenous populations of Oceania and do we have a library of books or films to tell our story? No. We have tourist hula shows and commercials where the “natives” tend to tourists like indentured servants with plastic, lifeless smiles. It’s not such a charming picture, is it? The truth is ugly, but so is ignorance or denial of such atrocities and pain.

Matansa. It means massacre in the Chamorro language, and is a nickname for the village of San Roque in the northern part of the island of Saipan that endured the most brutal slaughtering as a punishment for Chamorro resistance by Imperial Japan in WWII, which was part of an ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign that almost completely wiped out the Chamorro population from the face of the earth. San Roque is my family’s village.