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They Were Soldiers

Metadata

  • Author: Ann Jones
  • ASIN: B00G8O9NCS
  • ISBN: 1608463710
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G8O9NCS
  • Kindle link

Highlights

“War is disgusting and horrific. It never leaves the people who were involved in it. The damage is far greater than the lists of casualties or cost in dollars. It permeates lifestyles. It infects cultures and people and worldviews. The war is never over for us. The fighting stops. The troops get called back. But the war goes on for those damaged by war.” — location: 324 ^ref-39906

We blast along, in the ice-cold, hard-metal cargo container, bringing democracy to people who practiced governance by (male) consensus before the United States came into being. — location: 399 ^ref-24897

I wonder if this is to be the civilians’ reward for paying taxes into the war chest: the possibility of getting a combat-experienced brain surgeon when we’re shot in the head at the mall. — location: 885 ^ref-30861

For the poor—immigrants, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, African-Americans, and whites alike—the military often offers what looks like the only way up and out. — location: 2247 ^ref-63751

These TCNs (third-country nationals), were trafficked in with no way out, often subjected to repeated sexual assaults, effectively enslaved, and kept under wraps. In the midst of the Iraq war, thousands of underfed TCNs rioted, demanding food, and tore up American bases. Yet, because of the lack of journalists on the scene, American taxpayers remained largely unaware of the extraordinary human rights violations they were funding. — location: 2271 ^ref-43735

this private shadow army of highly paid managers and badly paid workers, — location: 2275 ^ref-26056

The wars, it seemed, had become a remarkably efficient engine for transferring the wealth of the nation from the public treasury to the pockets of the already rich. — location: 2311 ^ref-14629

During the decade of war, the Pentagon had forked over to the top 37 fraudulent corporations alone $1.1 trillion. — location: 2323 ^ref-43376

Historically, in the trenches of the Marne, as on the beaches of Normandy and Guadalcanal, it was the justness of the cause for which soldiers fought that ennobled their sacrifice—not the other way around. Which means that the death, dismemberment, and disintegration of misled young men and women should not redeem the misbegotten “wars of choice” chosen for us by leaders who have never been to war. — location: 2358 ^ref-2603

“We don’t know how any of this happened to our kids.” — location: 2374 ^ref-39706