I mean... if you're raised as a decent human being, killing somebody is against every moral thing you've ever been taught. And so, generally, in comb….

Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vi….

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? A….

Victory in combat is like sex with a prostitute. For a moment you forget everything in the sudden physical rush, but then you have to pay your money ….

We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the ….

In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right ….

This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in th….

He ran as he'd never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been cho….

When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of ….

For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewild….

Everything is touched by the holy when it is in the presence of death..

Quitting is unthinkable and pain is just weakness leaving the body.

I mean, if you're proud of what you've done when you've served in the military, well then we call that bragging. And if you are unhappy about what ha….

The time for debilitating fear is before and after the mission..

War is society's dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults..

Matterhorn is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again..

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about.

It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans..

When the peace treaty is signed, the war isn't over for the veterans, or the family. It's just starting..

Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow..

The Marine Corps taught me how to kill, but it didn't teach me how to deal with killing..