A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.
You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you kn...
One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?'I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thin...
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you s...
He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt...
For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracti...
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
But in a story I can steal her soul.
All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was...
Sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you...
What they carried varied by mission.
What happened, and what might have happened?
They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In
The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.
Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there.
It occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separ...
How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead