Quotes from Michael Herr

What is the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

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

The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your eyes. Time and information, rock and roll, life itself, the information isn't frozen, you are.

Mostly what you had was on the agitated side of half-sleep, you thought you were sleeping but you were really just waiting.

There were times when your fear would take directions so wild that you had to stop and watch the spin.

When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, 'sorry' just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.

That night I listened while a colonel explained the war in terms of protein. We were a nation of high-protein, meat-eating hunters, while the other guy just ate rice and a few grungy fish heads. We were going to club him to death with our meat; what could you say except, 'Colonel, you're insane?' It was like turning up in the middle of some black looneytune where the Duck had all the lines.

Officially, the complexion of the problem had changed (too many people were getting killed, for one thing), and the romance of spooking started to fall away like dead meat from a bone. As sure as heat rises, their time was over.

We mentioned it later to some people who'd been at the Pacification briefing, someone from the Times and someone from the AP, and they both agreed that the kid from the Big Red One had said more about the Hearts-and-Minds programme than they'd heard in over an hour of statistics, but their bureaus couldn't use his story, they wanted ambassador Komer's. And they got it and you got it.

I hadn't been anywhere, I'd performed half an act; the war only had one way of coming to take your pain away quickly.

they could take you off shuddering in your sleep. No one who heard it was able to smile that bitter, secret survivor's smile that was the reflex to almost all news of disaster. It was too awful even for that.

I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it

Some stories must be told—not because they will delight and instruct but because they happened.

Anyway, you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils.

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.

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.

It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

Out on the street I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse.

As one American major said, in a successful attempt at attaining history, "We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it."

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?