War & Peace Quote by David Hackworth

War doesn’t just brutalize; it also produces a strange, stubborn comedy. Hackworth’s line lands because it refuses the tidy myth of the always-alert warrior and replaces it with something more unsettling: the soldier as a human animal who can’t stay in mortal seriousness forever. “Grunts” is doing double duty here. It’s blunt, class-coded, and affectionate in the way infantrymen often talk about themselves - a word that strips away heroics and puts the body back in the frame: tired legs, jittery hands, the constant ache of being exposed.

The punch is the “still.” Even on the line, even with death actively courting them, they “goof off.” Hackworth isn’t praising recklessness; he’s describing a survival reflex. The subtext is that discipline has limits, and the psyche compensates. Goofing off becomes a pressure valve, a way to steal back a sliver of normalcy from an environment designed to erase it. That’s why the final clause cuts: they know the cost. This isn’t ignorance. It’s a wager against panic and paralysis.

Context matters: Hackworth wrote in the long shadow of Korea and Vietnam, wars where infantry boredom and sudden terror lived side by side. His intent reads as corrective journalism from inside the machine: if you want to understand combat, stop imagining nonstop courage and start noticing the informal, profane, very alive culture that forms where the enemy “wants them dead.” The line honors that culture without romanticizing it.