In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier is permitted…

- Philip Caputo

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from …

- Philip Caputo

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

- Philip Caputo

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of sh…

- Philip Caputo

The unraveling that I experienced much earlier in the Vietnam war than many people think, was due to the immediate foxhole experiences. But once I go…

- Philip Caputo

You're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

- Philip Caputo

In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front.

- Philip Caputo

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

- Philip Caputo

War, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

- Philip Caputo