And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.

I was a terrible soldier. That’s the thing with mandatory service—it’s not for everyone, yet everyone has to go.

I do feel ashamed of having participated to the slightest even as a tool in those dark days. But I was obliged to serve the state to which I had taken an oath. It was a tragic fate.

And the worst part about making a soldier of a man is not that a soldier kills brown men or white men, but that the soldier loses his own soul.

The worst excuse a soldier can make for declining service is that he once ranked the commander he is ordered to report to.

I surrendered my moral conscience to the fact that I was a soldier, and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine.

The better you are as a soldier, the worse you are as a human being.

A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.

The thought that I had been captured so soon, without having done anything for the revolution, made me feel ashamed. I thought: at least now, I must carry out my duty well under torture.

I thought I was doing my duty for my country. I didn't know I was going to be treated like a convict. Did it make better soldiers of the callow youths we were then? I doubt it.

So we were playing all this game then and thinking that to be a soldier was to be the best thing in the world because gun is looking so powerful and men in movie are looking so powerful and strong when they are killing people, but I am knowing now that to be a soldier is only to be weak and not strong, and to have no food to eat and not to eat whatever you want, and also to have people making you do thing that you are not wanting to do and not be doing whatever you are wanting which is what they are doing in movie. But I am only knowing this now because I am soldier now.