Michael Herr

“The problem was that you didn't always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later.”

“Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.”

“All you could do was give it a name and make a story out of it.”

“I went to cover the war, and the war covered me.”

“There was a map of the war, but it was a map of the wrong war.”

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

“We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum firepower.”

“You could be in the most protected space in Vietnam and still know that your safety was provisional.”

“In the back of every column of print you read about Vietnam, there was a dripping, laughing death-face.”

“But you could never be sure, and that was the great horror of it.”

“Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony.”

“It was the talk of the town, but the town was a battlefield.”