Tim O'Brien (author)

"At night, when I couldnt sleep, Id sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. Id be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didnt understand and didnt want to understand."

"They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

"I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasnt thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldnt happen. I was above it."

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but its a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but hes dead. Thats a true story that never happened."

"Well, I still dont get it, she said. The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail. And thats bad? No. Not exactly. What then? She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. I dont know, it just seem strange, sort of. How youve figured everything out, all the angles, except what its for. For us, he said. I love you, Kath. But it feels — I shouldnt say this — it feels manipulating.... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)"

"I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasnt it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim OBrien and you can "feel" those deaths. OBrien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts."

"The way I see it, he came back pretty shattered, pretty fucked up, then he got married to Kathy and they had this really great love thing going. Never saw two people so feelie-grabbie. So he gets his life back together. Doesnt say anything about the Vietnam shit — not to his wife or me or anybody. And then after a while he cant say anything. Sort of trapped, you know? Thats my theory. I dont think it started out as an intentional lie, he just kept mum about it — who the hell wouldnt? — and pretty soon he probably talked himself into believing it never happened at all. The guy was a magic man... I guess it basically boils down to a case of colossal self-deception."

"[remembering the day he got his draft notice] It was a summer afternoon, maybe June of 68. And I remember taking that envelope into the house and putting it on the kitchen table where my mom and dad were having lunch. They just looked at it and knew what it was. The silence of that lunch. I didnt speak, my mom didnt speak, my dad didnt speak. It was just that piece of paper lying at the center of the table. It was enough to make me cry to this day, not for myself, but for my mom and dad, both of whom had been in the Navy during World War Two, and had believed in service to ones country and all those values. (from the companion book, p. 318)"

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the power of the things they carried."

"They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it."

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing — these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight."

"Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You cant fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you cant make them undead."