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.

We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Becausewe all knew that if you stayed too long you became one of those poor bastards who had to have a war on all the time, and where was that?

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

We never announced a scorched-earth policy; we never announced any policy at all, apart from finding and destroying the enemy, and we proceeded in the most obvious way. We used what was at hand, dropping the greatest volume of explosives in the history of warfare over all the terrain within the thirty-mile sector which fanned out from Khe Sanh. Employing saturation-bombing techniques, we delivered more than 110,000 tons of bombs to those hills during the eleven-week containment of Khe Sanh.

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.

Some people just wanted to blow it all to hell, animal, vegetable and mineral. They wanted a Vietnam they could fit into their car ashtrays.

It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and retard the dawn, when everybody knows that if you're feeling lucky you're really feeling time in its rawest form, and if you're not feeling lucky, they've got a clock at the bus station.

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