Michael Herr Quotes & Sayings

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

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

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn't done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn't let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras ... We'd all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. — Michael Herr

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

Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar. [ ... ] I knew one 4th division Lurp who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just right for him, that could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope. "They sure give you the range," he said. — Michael Herr

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

And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be? — Michael Herr

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

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

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

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

Some people think 1963's a long time ago; when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty. It was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregulars, working in remote places with little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know. — Michael Herr

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

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

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

For years now there had been no country here but the war. — Michael Herr

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

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

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

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody form his home town had been killed. He didn't even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. I mean, can you just see *two* guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam? — 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

There was a black marine called Philly Dog who'd been a gang lord in Philadelphia and who was looking forward to some street fighting after six months in the jungle, he could so the kickers what he could do with some city ground. (In Hue he turned out to be incredibly valuable. I saw him pouring out about a hundred rounds of .30-caliber fire into a breach in the wall, laughing, 'You got to bring some to get some'; he seemed to be about the only man in Delta Company who hadn't been hurt yet.) — Michael Herr

You don't have to be a seasoned tactician to realize that your ass is cold. — Michael Herr

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

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