"Christ, I'm busy and there's a lot of people who wanna give me parties and I've got to go and say good-bye to the troops. And Jesus, we've got some great troops here, just great. I'm so kinda sad leaving them, just kinda sad. I was sittin' in the chopper today and I just bawled my goddamn head off, I just did. Funny... It isn't that I don't want to come home; I want to come home and I'm sick of this war a little bit. But leaving this unit is tough, and that's all there is to it."

“In each generation, as long as we are to remain a great nation, a group of us are somehow chosen, perhaps by the Almighty, to serve our country and our army and to serve the nation. Perhaps it is a small group, woefully inadequate, but it is there, and regardless of how we see it, regardless of the dwindling budget, the ancient outdated tanks of the 1920s and equipment, the congressional pressures to cut, cut, cut, that group will stay, and as the poet said: "Some for honor, and some for pay.”

“While I was never over-romanced by the West Point graduate, at the same time, I always felt, by God, a West Pointer ought to be damn good.”

“Ever since I was a child I never wanted to be anything else but a soldier.”

“I went home and stayed at Green Meadows. A couple of days later we all went up to Boston and the aircraft landed. I'll never forget it. My dad got out of the aircraft and he really looked super; he was fifty-nine years old at the time. WIth him in the aircaft were a couple of division commanders, including John W. O'Daniel, who had lost his son in the Normandy invasion and who later became my commanding general at the Infantry School at Fort Benning when I went through the basic officers course in 1946. Also aboard was Leon Johnson , who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for the Ploesti Raid, followed by eight or nine noncoms, not one of whom was wearing less than a Silver Star. All of this was followed by a ticker-tape parade through Boston. That evening my father spoke at the Shell on the Esplanade in Boston. We came home that night quite late and the next morning he came upstairs and woke me up and said we were going for breakfast. I ate breakfast with him and then I got on a train and went back to West Point. It was the last time I ever saw him.”

“Prior to Ap Bac, the Kennedy administration had succeeded in preventing the American public from being more than vaguely conscious that the country was involved in a war in a place called Vietnam.”

“I don't know how long this thing will last... We can still lose this war. That's a real clear statement. I wouldn't be a goddamned bit surprised but that we can still lose it. And then you can just write those casualties off and those ever-increasing names on those ever-increasing monuments... You can keep putting them on the monuments and giving out all this crap, all this posthumous DSCs and Purple Hearts... but there's no end to this thing.”