Michael Herr Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

There was such a dense concentration of energy there [Vietnam], American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

Michael Herr
As one American major said, in a successful attempt at attaining history, "We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it."

Michael Herr
There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he'd answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em so much."

Michael Herr
Out on the street I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn't even have to fuse.

Michael Herr
War stories aren't really anything more than stories about people anyway.

Michael Herr
I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Michael Herr
We came to fear something more complicated than death, an annihilation less final but more complete, and we got out. Because... we 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
I think that Vietnam is what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Michael Herr
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
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
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
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