“Despite a number of near misses, I came through the war unscathed. In Tunisia a shell hit my vehicle but without harm to me, and in Sicily an exploding mine blew up my vehicle, but I was thrown clear. On the Roer River in Germany, just as I got out of my Jeep and entered a company command post, a mortar shell struck my vehicle. In the Remagen bridgehead on the Rhine a shell demolished a latrine moments after I had departed. Somehow none of the enemy shells had my number.”

— William Westmoreland, book A Soldier Reports

A Soldier Reports (1976)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Despite a number of near misses, I came through the war unscathed. In Tunisia a shell hit my vehicle but without harm t…" by William Westmoreland?

William Westmoreland32

United States Army general 1914–2005

Related quotes

“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

“Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to “penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear,” as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.”

John Barth book The Floating Opera

The Floating Opera (1956)

“In the past it never occurred to me that every casual remark of mine would be snatched up and recorded. Otherwise I would have crept further into my shell.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter to Carl Seelig (25 October 1953), p. 22
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

“When the sergeant had finally got his rounds on target and I had commended to him a thorough review of the mortar manual, I climbed down the ladder and into the courtyard just in time to rendezvous with a small German shell which exploded a few yards away, raising a cloud of dust and sending me rolling with a small fragment lodged in the sitzplatz. When I opened my eyes, there was my bug-eyed sergeant hanging out the window of the belfry calling to his radio operator, "Joe, I think the Krauts got the old man in the tail."”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

That is how I got my Purple Heart.
Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 94

“I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
Tales of ships.”

Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905) American poet

With a Nantucket Shell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Gather a shell from the strewn beach / And listen at its lips: they sigh / The same desire and mystery, / The echo of the whole sea's speech", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea Hints; The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood / On dusty shelves, when held against the ear / Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear / The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood. / We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood / In our own veins, impetuous and near", Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Sonnet. Sea-shell Murmurs'.