Michael Herr Quotes

How many times did someone have to run in front of a machine gun before it became an act of cowardice?

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

Talk about impersonating an identity, about locking into a role, about irony; I went to cover the war and the war covered me; an old story, unless of course you've never heard it.

What is the difference between the Marine Corps and the Boy Scouts? The Boy Scouts have adult leadership.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

If war was hell and only hell and there were no other colors in the palate I don't think people would continue to make war.

You can still see the shadow from when the Zeppelin floated over America; it took like Islam in the desert . . .

Every time I had a vision of myself lying dead somewhere, it was up there, in the Highlands.

Maybe nothing's so unfunny as an omen read wrong.

We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.

for years now there had been no country here but the war.

...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.