“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days… But, be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again, to teach to others what we know, and to try with what’s left of our lives to find a goodness and a meaning to this life.” – Platoon (1986)

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” – Ernest Hemingway

“The first casualty of war is innocence.” – Oliver Stone

“When the rich wage war it’s the poor that die.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” – Tim O’Brien

“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” – Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor