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….

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….

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

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

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 ….

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..

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

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 ….

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….

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

We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're….

And I think that it's - the military has actually made improvements, so people are considering post-traumatic stress disorder as, at the least, a pos….

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.

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

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….

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

I knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals….

I don't want any romantics to go into the military. I'm not a pacifist. I think we need a military, and the better one we have, the better off we are….

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….