You remember all those phrases about how these people - Asians - dont value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.

Americans, particularly after World War II, tended to romanticize war because in World War II our cause was the cause of humanity, and our soldiers brought home glory and victory, and thank God that they did. But it led us to romanticize it to some extent.

We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.

World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.

The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.