I was scared before every battle. That old instinct of self-preservation is a pretty basic thing, but while the action was going on some part of my mind shut off and my training and discipline took over. I did what I had to do.
Audie MurphyRead
Now I have shed my first blood. I feel no qualms, no pride, no remorse. There is only a weary indifference that will follow me throughout the war.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the numbness and emotional fatigue that follows experiencing violence for the first time in war.
Audie Murphy's quote reflects the emotional turmoil and desensitization that soldiers often experience after engaging in combat. The phrase depicts a state of weary indifference that replaces the anticipated feelings of pride or remorse, emphasizing how the brutality of war can alter one's psyche and diminish emotional responses to violence.
In practice
A speaker at a veterans' event might use this quote to discuss the psychological impact of combat.
I was scared before every battle. That old instinct of self-preservation is a pretty basic thing, but while the action was going on some part of my mind shut off and my training and discipline took over. I did what I had to do.
They were singing in French, but the melody was freedom and any American could understand that.
After the war, they took Army dogs and rehabilitated them for civilian life. But they turned soldiers into civilians immediately, and let em sink or swim.
Sometimes it takes more courage to get up and run than to stay. You either just do it or you don't. I got so scared the first day in combat I just decided to go along with it.
No soldier ever really survives a war.
I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
As a career Army bomb technician, I have seen real heroism in the Ranger warfighters I stalked Afghanistan with each night and in the injured combatants whom I healed alongside in Walter Reed Army Medical Center after losing the two legs God gave me.
As for my own part I care not for death, for all men are mortal; and though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am indeed endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom.
There are deaths in public places on the grounds that the victim is gay.
If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck
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