Michael Herr Quotes

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

Michael Herr

#2. And I know, because I've been there, that there is a hellworld where you're always expected to have an opinion about everything all the time: a judgment, a take - a 'view,' in the most ordinary sense of the word.

Michael Herr

#3. 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.

Michael Herr

#4. 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.

Michael Herr

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

Michael Herr

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

Michael Herr

#7. Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Michael Herr

#8. You could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying, 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' Which wasn't at all true of me. I was there to watch.

Michael Herr

#9. 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?

Michael Herr

#10. For years now there had been no country here but the war.

Michael Herr

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

Michael Herr

#12. 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.

Michael Herr

#13. 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,

Michael Herr

#14. And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?

Michael Herr

#15. 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.

Michael Herr

#16. 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.

Michael Herr

#17. Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims.

Michael Herr

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

Michael Herr

#19. You don't have to be a seasoned tactician to realize that your ass is cold.

Michael Herr

#20. 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.

Michael Herr