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Say what you will, nothing can make a complete soldier except battle experience.

Ernie Pyle

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Ernie Pyle
Age: 44 †
Born: 1900
Born: August 3
Died: 1945
Died: April 18
Journalist
Writer
Dana
Indiana
Ernest Taylor Ernie Pyle
Ernest Taylor Pyle
Nothing
Make
Soldier
Complete
Except
Battle
Experience

More quotes by Ernie Pyle

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The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.
Ernie Pyle
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[I]nstead of the usual Why can't we make movies more like real life? I think a more pertinent question is Why can't real life be more like the movies?
Ernie Pyle
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Our artillery has really been sensational. For once we have enough of something and at the right time. Officers tell me they actually have more guns than they know what to do with.
Ernie Pyle
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I was away from the front lines for a while this spring, living with other troops, and considerable fighting took place while I was gone. When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front I wondered if I would sense any change in them.
Ernie Pyle
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All the rest of us - you and me and even the thousands of soldiers behind the lines in Africa - we want terribly yet only academically for the war to get over.
Ernie Pyle
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If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will let you alone.
Ernie Pyle
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For a lifetime I had bathed with becoming regularity, and thought the world would come to an end unless I changed my socks every day. But in Africa I sometimes went without a bath for two months, and I went two weeks at a time without even changing my socks. Oddly enough, it didn't seem to make much difference.
Ernie Pyle
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Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.
Ernie Pyle
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I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can't be won without.
Ernie Pyle
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The American soldier is quick in adapting himself to a new mode of living. Outfits which have been here only three days have dug vast networks of ditches three feet deep in the bare brown earth. They have rigged up a light here and there with a storage battery.
Ernie Pyle
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About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation like a bee buzzing in blind fury.
Ernie Pyle
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Somebody said that carrier pilots were the best in the world, and they must be or there wouldn't be any of them left alive.
Ernie Pyle
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If I can just see the European war out I think I might feel justified in quitting the war.
Ernie Pyle
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In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
Ernie Pyle
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Some day I'd like to cover a war in a country as ugly as war itself.
Ernie Pyle
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Our artillery... The Germans feared it almost more than anything we had.
Ernie Pyle
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There is no sense in the struggle, but there is no choice but to struggle.
Ernie Pyle
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Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now.
Ernie Pyle
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I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.
Ernie Pyle