I suffer the mortification of seeing myself attacked right and left by people at home professing patriotism and love of country who never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet. I pity them and the...
The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.
Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not...
I cruised into this war thinking my buddy's going to take a bullet, and I'm going to be the fucking hero pulling him out of harm's way. Instead, I end up pulling out this little girl we shot, hiding...
I took out my grenade and put my fingers inside the pin. 'Do you boys want this to be your last meal, or do you want to answer his question?'
A bullet hole in my bedroom door was a grim reminder of December 7, 1941, and of an entire nation which had not been sufficiently awake…
What the war did to dreamers
It was unreal, grotesquely unreal, that morning skies which dawned so tenderly blue could be profaned with cannon smoke that hung over the town like low thunder clouds, that warm noontides filled with...
Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and...
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.
All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a...
That of dealing death, of loosing another man's soul and sending it down to hell. You want to savor it, to twist the blade deeper and pull the man's heart and guts out upon the iron point of your...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....