War Quote by John Pomfret

"I've been shot at on numerous occasions" is the kind of deadpan line that smuggles danger into a tidy, almost bureaucratic package. The verb choice matters: not "shot", but "shot at" - the grammar of proximity. It claims credibility without offering a wound, turning survival into a résumé line. "Numerous occasions" does similar work: it’s deliberately vague, a phrase you’d expect in a report, not a confession. The understatement reads as practiced, the voice of someone who’s learned that drama can get you killed or, just as plausibly, get you disbelieved.

If John Pomfret is the journalist of that name, the context practically writes itself: war zones, political uprisings, places where bearing witness comes with a physical price. In that setting, the intent is less bragging than boundary-setting. It signals, "I’m not theorizing this from a safe distance". It also telegraphs a certain professional deformation: when bullets become recurring "occasions", the abnormal has been normalized. That normalization is the subtext - not courage as a headline, but risk as routine.

Culturally, the line plays into how conflict reporting (or any high-risk fieldwork) is marketed and consumed: audiences want authenticity, institutions want proof of toughness, and the speaker learns to compress trauma into a credential. The chilliness isn’t a lack of feeling; it’s a survival language, built to keep the story moving when the body wants to stop.