Quotes & Sayings About Gunners

Once a gunner, always a gunner — Cesc Fabregas

In the debate over guns, both sides are angry. The pro-gunners are angry at the ignorance, lies, and distortions of the anti-gunners, and the anti-gunners are angry with the pro-gunners for presenting facts. — Dave Champion

We organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna-two regiments so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be jealous of First. — Robert A. Heinlein

When God made the world he made the big plain just for the cavalry. It was firm, or would be when the sun had dried off the night's rain, and it was mostly level. The sabres could fall like scythes in the corn. The Arapiles, Greater and Lesser, God made for the gunners. From their summits, conveniently made flat so that the artillery could have a stable platform, the guns could dominate the plain. God had made nothing for the infantry, except a soil easily dug into graves, but the infantry were used to that. All — Bernard Cornwell

Another time I had gone out on patrol in the mist and had carefully warned the guard commander beforehand. But in coming back I stumbled against a bush, the startled sentry called out that the Fascists were coming, and I had the pleasure of hearing the guard commander order everyone to open rapid fire in my direction. Of course I lay down and the bullets went harmlessly over me. Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some machine-gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me. 'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera. 'Oh no, we won't fire.' The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was unintentional, but the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. — George Orwell

Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn, — Che Guevara

The harder the fighting and the longer the war, the more the infantry, and in fact all the arms, lean on the gunners. — Bernard Law Montgomery

In fact, it's almost big enough to cross time zones. The lab is amidships and takes up nearly half the available space. In front of it and behind it there are weapons stations where two gunners can stand back to back and look out to either side of the vehicle through slit windows like the embrasures in a medieval castle. Each of these stations can be sealed off from the lab by a bulkhead door. Further aft, there's something like an engine room. Forward, there are crew quarters, with a dozen wall-mounted cot beds and two chemical toilets, the kitchen space, and then the cockpit, which has a pedestal gun of the same calibre as the Humvee's and about as many controls as a passenger jet. Justineau — M.R. Carey

At Vipers, when the German gunners shot Afroze who chose to cry out his grief knowing the consequences rather than bear the death of a beloved in silence, a whisper burbled across the field: Ina lillahi wa inna illayhi rajiun. The men of the 40th, not all of them Muslim, whispered the words for the two dead men, and the prayer would have reached the gunners as wind on water or the sighs of ghosts. — Kamila Shamsie

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane's gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting. — Laura Hillenbrand

Reggie always wears the team jersey - and a pair of shorts - no matter how cold it gets.
I'm betting he dreams about one day being called on to make a comeback.
'We need five tries in the last three minutes. It's almost impossible, Reggie. That's why I'm asking you.'
'Piece of cake, Dusty. Here, mind me false teeth.'
Dusty's been with the Gunners as long as I can remember. He's an institution - or he should be in one - it's one of the two. — Bill Condon

Linguists holding bullhorns hollered, "A bas les Boches! A bas les Marcon! Down with the Boches! Down with the Macaronis! Vive la France!" A mortar crew with the 18th Infantry fired a special shell the size of an ostrich egg. It soared 200 feet into the night, detonated with dazzling pyrotechnic sparkle, and unfurled an American flag, which floated to earth; given a clear target at last, French gunners replied with eager fire. — Rick Atkinson

My soundless feet shall fly among the runners
Through the red thunders of a Zeppelin raid,
My still voice cheer the Anti-Aircraft gunners,
The fires shall glare - but I shall cast no shade. — Stella Benson

Sometimes parties of men went spud-gathering in no-man's-land. About a mile to the right of us, where the lines were closer together, there was a patch of potatoes that was frequented both by the Fascists and ourselves. We went there in the daytime, they only at night, as it was commanded by our machine-guns. One night to our annoyance they turned out en masse and cleared up the whole patch. We discovered another patch further on, where there was practically no cover and you had to lift the potatoes lying on your belly - a fatiguing job. If their machine-gunners spotted you, you had to flatten yourself out like a rat when it squirms under a door, with the bullets cutting up the clods a few yards behind you. It seemed worth it at the time. Potatoes were getting very scarce. If you got a sackful you could take them down to the cook-house and swap them for a water-bottleful of coffee. And — George Orwell

The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out. — Hilary Mantel

In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit. — Ernst Junger

When society gives censors wide and vague powers they never confine themselves to deserving targets. They are not snipers, but machine-gunners. Allow them to fire at will, and they will hit anything that moves. — Nick Cohen

I'm a bit of a gunner on the QWERTY keyboard. — Jay Watson

Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea ... In them burned one more the fever of migration, consuming with its fires all other desires and passions. — Rachel Carson