Quotes from Neil Sheehan

Beneath Ba's bravado, he was a conservative man. He did not lack courage. Neither was he a professional risk-taker like Vann. He had been an officer in a colonial army that had lost its war. He was fighting this second war for the Tory regime of his class. He was doing precisely what could be expected of a man who had grown up in a system where, when in doubt, the best thing to do was to do nothing. He was stalling.

Lansdale became the Agency's expert on guerrilla warfare and countersubversion. He also acquired something more important in government than recognized expertise: a mystique, a reputation for being able to perform miracles.

President Kennedy would have been better served if he had remembered from his days as a junior officer in the Navy that the closer one gets to a fight, the more one learns of its essence.

Inflation was held to between 50 and 60 percent a year, mainly by more than doubling the commodity imports AID financed for the South Vietnamese economy ($ 650 million in 1966) and by shipping millions of tons of American rice to a country that had been able to export rice as recently as 1964.

Disaffection, once begun, acquires a momentum of its own

Yellow and brown men forgot in listening to the rhetoric of American presidents that the United States was a status quo power with a great capacity to rationalize arrangements that served its status quo interests.

Armies, like human beings, are not capable of what is not in them.

Malcolm Browne managed to take a photograph of Arnett [AP's Peter Arnett] standing behind Halberstam for protection a moment later, just before another plainclothesman sneaked up behind Browne and smashed his camera with a rock. The rock did not damage the film inside. The Surete men backed off. They apparently had orders not use clubs, and they decided Halberstam was too much for them hand to hand. The uniformed police did not intervene

I had read the official reports. I knew by then that official reports were never enough to explain John Vann. There was always more to his story.

There are Calleys in every army. What makes them dangerous is a set of circumstances in which their homicidal aberrations can run amok. The laws of war say that it is the responsibility of the highest leadership to do all in its power to prevent such circumstances from occurring.

You never hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt," Vann said.

after his second and more satisfying career in the service of the American state, the furniture of Ellsworth Bunker's mind had settled into place. It was impossible for him not to see Vietnam in the perspective of the Caribbean and Central America.

He had not felt any genuine grief until the moment he accepted the flag, because he had hardly known his father and knew even less about what his father had done.

The cockiness of this bantam did not put off Porter, a senior colonel of infantry, large-boned in build and white-haired at fifty-two, whose restrained manner tended to obscure his knowledge of his profession and the firmness of his own character.

This was an army that shared a confidence too in its weapons and in its combat skills. The world was a tactical map to these men. They were prepared to fight any enemy at any grid coordinate.

Bowers had noticed on earlier operations that the ARVN noncoms, unlike their officers, seemed to welcome help and thought an American sergeant enough of a cut above them so that they could blame him if things went wrong.

To burn the helicopters would be another act of great psychological value, and the battalion commander did not want to surrender the opportunity lightly.