Quotes from Philip Caputo

Stack 'em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.

Before you leave here, Sir, you're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.

And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.

So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself.

that the greatest happiness lies in living for others. The self and its appetites, the satisfaction of which only yields deeper hungers, are to the soul as mooring cables to an airship. To cut them willingly and without regret is to know true emancipation, the kind that cannot be granted by constitutions, proclamations, manifestos. Yes

You can thank us by doing something serious with it

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.

The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.

There was so much human suffering in these scenes that I could not respond to it.

The plotting he'd had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman's capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand.

What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).

I had only one hard-and-fast rule: avoid interstates. They are predictable and boring, and their uniformity somehow erases changes in landscape; you can drive six hundred miles, from forests into desert, and feel that you haven't gone anywhere. In a sense, you haven't. You have no idea about the lives of the people in the towns and cities you've bypassed at seventy miles an hour. *

As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn't been there.

The combination of exhaustion, anxiety, alcohol, and drugs had the inevitable effect: I had a nervous collapse and spent the next several days in the psychiatric ward of an East Coast hospital, drugged on Thorazine yet happy that no one could get to me.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.

We left Vietnam peculiar creatures, with young shoulders that bore rather old heads.

Aside from their companionship, I'd brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function.

The war was still being fought, but this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed.

I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't want a gray world." "You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from." "Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it." "So rather than a melting pot, it would be a..." "A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.

Someone had told me, years ago, that Key West's latitude was the northernmost from which the Southern Cross was visible. I had glimpsed it just once, in 1980, while on a night swordfishing trip in the Gulf Stream. It hung a hand's width above the horizon in the southwest—four stars like the points of a crystal kite. On