{"author":"Clint Van Winkle","author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle","total_quotes":14,"quotes":[{"text":"Who supports the troops? The troops support the troops.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["army","iraq","lip-service","military","ptsd","soldiers","support","troops","war"],"id":15683,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"Peace surfaced here. Hard to imagine a person finding peace through war, but no one finds peace in war—peace finds you. It crawls into your sleeping bag and helps you fall asleep, nudges your arm, tells you to turn over, think about home.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["army","military","mind","peace","ptsd","soldiers","war"],"id":16232,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"I was enjoying the great human trophy hunt and, looking back, it scares the hell out of me.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["human","hunt","scare","war"],"id":35819,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"The shooting and killing weren’t as black-and-white as most people think. The actions live in that hazy area of blown-apart stone walls and hesitations. Sometimes I shot when I shouldn’t have; other times I didn’t shoot when I should have. There was no way to explain why I did either. Everything happened so fast. Decisions had to be made. After I got home I began to see things in slow motion, see the actions that might’ve been mistakes.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["army","decisions","iraq","military","mistakes","remorse","soldiers","war"],"id":182306,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"I wanted to see my family, but didn't want to leave the other guys. The people waiting for us were strangers, even though I knew every last one of them.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["family","home","post-deployment","return","strangers"],"id":201070,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"I wanted people to know that we fired rounds into moving trucks and open windows to survive, not for anyone else’s freedom. Not for the Democrats. Not for Republicans. Just to survive.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["army","freedom","iraq","military","politics","survive","war"],"id":201595,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["deployment","memior","soldier","words"],"id":241528,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can’t feel it, you weren’t paying attention. And if you weren’t paying attention, you are probably dead anyway.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["army","experience","iraq","military","ptsd","soldiers","war"],"id":256794,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"Unfortunately, just like bullets, you can never get words back once they have been sent out into the world.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["bullets","regret","words"],"id":266421,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"},{"text":"No matter what the reason, the ways I tried to justify the situation, the second-guessing that lingered, nothing could change the fact that people stopped existing because of me.","author":"Clint Van Winkle","tags":["death","deployment","marine","survival","war"],"id":315937,"author_id":"Clint+Van+Winkle"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}