Philip Caputo

Being a correspondent at the Vietnam war for me was about exposing myself to danger but it wasn't completely self-serving. I felt…

— Philip Caputo

I'm a Midwesterner by birth, and when I traveled there, when I was young, most of the small towns were thriving, vibrant…

— Philip Caputo

You're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.

— Philip Caputo

“I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't…

— Philip Caputo

“The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.”

— Philip Caputo

“Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where…

— Philip Caputo

War, the ordinary man's most convenient means of escaping from the ordinary.

— Philip Caputo

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add…

— Philip Caputo

Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way…

— Philip Caputo

“Before you leave here, Sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average…

— Philip Caputo

In a guerrilla war, the line between legitimate and illegitimate killing is blurred. The policies of free-fire zones, in which a soldier…

— Philip Caputo

It’s paradoxical that the death of your quarry is besides the point and at the same time the whole point. A chase…

— Philip Caputo

I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war...suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old…

— Philip Caputo

“Ten days passed, ten days of total idleness. The novelty of our surroundings wore off and the battalion began to suffer from…

— Philip Caputo

“Fitzhugh wasn’t immune to the desire that’s in most people to spray graffiti on the cold rock of the world and say…

— Philip Caputo

In wartime, the degree of patriotism is directly proportional to distance from the front.

— Philip Caputo

“that the greatest happiness lies in living for others. The self and its appetites, the satisfaction of which only yields deeper hungers,…

— Philip Caputo

True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.

— Philip Caputo

The unraveling that I experienced much earlier in the Vietnam war than many people think, was due to the immediate foxhole experiences.…

— Philip Caputo

“The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and…

— Philip Caputo