Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

If war was hell and only hell and there were no other colors in the palate I don't think people would continue to make war.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Becausewe all knew that if you stayed too long you became one of those poor bastards who had to have a war on all the time, and where was that?

Every time I had a vision of myself lying dead somewhere, it was up there, in the Highlands.

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.