"Going After Cacciato" Quotes
A soldier in the Vietnam War recounts the surreal and imaginative journey of a comrade who escapes from the front lines.
fiction | 352 pages | Published in 2009
Quotes
Sometimes the only thing you learn from war is that you love war.
Courage, I learned, was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe
Rub-a-dub-dub, three million dead in a tub.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
You don't concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
It's not the body I want. It's the killing.
The places they dreamed of were always white, always winters, always far away.
