Michael Herr famous quotes

03-28-2025

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

#Running #Gun #Machines
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

#War #Long #Finals
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

#War #Thinking #Color
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

#War #Identity #Stories
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

#Animal #Blow #Vegetables
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.
-- Michael Herr

#Hands #Enemy #Warfare
Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
-- Michael Herr

#War #Childhood #Vietnam
It's a corny old gag about Las Vegas, the temporal city if there ever was one, trying to camouflage the hours and ***** 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

#Las Vegas #Cities #Feelings
Maybe nothing's so unfunny as an omen read wrong.
-- Michael Herr

#Omen
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

#Military #Thinking #People

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