Dispatches

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

A lot of things had to be unlearned before you could learn anything at all

"Остановите войну, они же сами себя убивают"

Служба во Вьетнаме подразумевало потерю рассудка, и оставалось лишь надеяться, что этого не случится рядом с тобой, что никто не начнёт палить напропалую в любого незнакомца или не будет минировать двери уборных.

- Мы не бойцы, - ответил Пейдж. - Мы корреспонденты.
Услышав это, командир бригады тут же решил организовать для нас операцию, поднять всю бригаду и кого-нибудь поубивать. Нам пришлось улететь на первой же вертушке, пока он и в самом деле этого не затеял.

There was a standard question you could use to open a conversation with troops, and Fouhy tried it. “How long you been in-country?” he asked.
The kid half lifted his head; that question could not be serious. The weight was really on him, and the words came slowly.
“All fuckin’ day,” he said.

They got savaged a lot and softened a lot, their secret brutalized them and darkened them and very often it made them beautiful. It took no age, seasoning or education to make them know exactly where true violence resided.

On the back of his flak jacket he had once written, Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I shall fear no Evil, because I’m the meanest motherfucker in the Valley, but he had tried later, without much success, to scrub it off because, he explained, every damn dude in the DMZ had that written on their flak jackets.

We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information.

It was three in in the morning, scary and upsetting like hearing a language for the first time and somehow understanding every word