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.

Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.

The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldnt bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

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.

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.