"I'd seen a two-and-a-half-ton truck blown right off the road by one of those [land mines] just a few vehicles ahead of me in a convoy coming back from Saigon" (Chapter 1, p. 4).

"My failure of nerve took another form. I wanted out, but I lacked the courage to confess my incompetence as the price of getting out. I was ready to be killed, even, perhaps, get others killed, to avoid that humiliation" (Chapter 1, p. 8).

"The men I'd respected when I was growing up had all served, and most of the writers I looked up to - Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, and of course Hemingway, to whom I turned for guidance in all things" (Chapter 2, p. 44).

"We were agreed that the world was a comical place, and that we'd been put here for the sacred purpose of being entertained by it" (Chapter 2, p. 55).

"I...