Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterwa...
The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under su...
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.
Zapped while zipping.
They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it...they died so as not to die of embarrassment...they were too frightened to be cowards. (p 20-21 TTTC)
They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused s...
What happened, and what might have happened?
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come hom...
I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.
He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around (p89 Sweetheart of Son...
Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles...
A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
People who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.
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