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 to the woman showing you the door. You see the dirt on the walls and your sorry image in the mirror.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

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

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

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 possible psychological problem. You know, when I was in Vietnam, it was just considered malingering. And we're making progress.

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 Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy.

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