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 combat it's 'krauts,' the 'gooks,' the 'yanks' - whatever you want to do to try and make it so that it's not a human being.

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. I don't want kids going in there thinking that it's John Wayne on Iwo Jima. That's not healthy.

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

Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.

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.

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

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