26 Quotes by 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 is permitted to shoot at any human target, armed or unarmed, further confuse the fighting man’s moral senses.

I saw their living mouths moving in conversation and their dead mouths grinning the taut-drawn grins of corpses. Their living eyes I saw, and their dead eyes still-staring. Had it not been for the fear that I was going crazy, I would have found it an interesting experience, a trip such as no drug could possibly produce. Asleep and dreaming, I saw dead men living; awake, I saw living men dead.

So I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war, to endure the same old experiences, suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.

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

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

As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself.

You can thank us by doing something serious with it.

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