Philip Caputo > Quotes

“Before you leave here, Sir, 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, A Rumor of War

“Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.”
― Philip Caputo, Indian Country

“The essence of the Marine Corps experience, I decided, was pain.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

“And men who do not expect to receive mercy eventually lose their inclination to grant it.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Anyone who does not acknowledge the darkness in his nature will succumb to it...the lamp of conviction needs to be shaded by doubt, or it burns with a blinding light.”
― Phillip Caputo

“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.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won't see it... True believers just don't see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn't be true believers anymore.”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith

“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.”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith

“The beaver dam had been constructed on the ruins of a man-made one, built by the CCC back in the thirties and later dynamited by an irate Finn who'd objected to the government's meddling with nature.”
― Philip Caputo, Indian Country

“that the greatest happiness lies in living for others. The self and its appetites, the satisfaction of which only yields deeper hungers, are to the soul as mooring cables to an airship. To cut them willingly and without regret is to know true emancipation, the kind that cannot be granted by constitutions, proclamations, manifestos. Yes,”
― Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith

“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.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

“There was so much human suffering in these scenes that I could not respond to it.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War: The Classic Vietnam Memoir

“You can thank us by doing something serious with it”
― Philip Caputo, Hunter's Moon: A Novel in Stories

“Another thing I had learned in Vietnam was that there are worse things than death, such as not being able to look anyone straight in the eye, especially the man in the mirror.”
― Philip Caputo, Means Of Escape: A War Correspondent's Memoir of Life and Death in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Vietnam

“General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Two friends of mine died trying to save the corpses of their men from the battlefield. Such devotion, simple and selfless, the sentiment of belonging to each other, was the one decent thing we found in a conflict otherwise notable for its monstrosities.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power,”
― Philip Caputo, The Voyage: A Novel

“Aside from their companionship, I’d brought Sage and Sky as ambassadors, hoping they would attract attention and open the door to conversations with strangers. In a moment, they fulfilled their diplomatic function.”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“The total distance—11,741 miles—gave me sticker shock. Round it up to twelve thousand. Almost halfway around the world! It seemed slightly mad, but then it might do me good. To make such an epic road trip, discovering places I’d never been, rediscovering others, never knowing what I’d find beyond the next curve or hill, would be to recapture the enchantment of youth, a sense of promise and possibility. The cicada chirped incessantly in my head. I clicked back to the first map. Looking at it brought on a mixture of eagerness and reluctance. The buzzing grew more shrill. If you don’t go now, geezer, you never will. I listened to my inner cicada, and the uneasiness subsided. If I’d learned anything, it was that the things you do never cause as much regret as the things you don’t. But”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“Dog Soldier Raid at New Scandinavia—1869,”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“It is often said that Vietnam, with its quotidian cruelties and pointlessness broadcast on the nightly news, caused Americans to lose their innocence about war. I don’t deny that this is true. The immediate power of the moving image is well attested to. It does, however, call to mind a quip I once heard: “The Americans have lost their innocence, but don’t worry, they’ll find it soon.” The power of the written word has the capacity to counteract this tendency, a value of which broadcast television is at best less capable. It provides every reader with a permanent opportunity for a private encounter with the reality of experience. So perhaps someone reading this book, now or many years in the future, will encounter a passage about a wounded Marine with “the hurt, dumb eyes of a child who has been severely beaten and does not know why.” Or they will read about an experienced NCO’s assessment that “one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“Once in a while, I found flint arrowheads in the muddy creek bank. Looking at them, I would dream of that savage, heroic time and wish I had lived then, before America became a land of salesmen and shopping centers.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn’t been there.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“I really believe that when we start talking ourselves back, we'll have more to offer the world." he [Woodenkinfe] said. "I don't want a gray world."
"You mean taking back our cultures and where we come from."
"Absolutely! You want to talk about the fabric of this country, that's it."
"So rather than a melting pot, it would be a..."
"A blanket of color, all sewn in the shape of the U.S.”
― Philip Caputo, The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, from Key West to the Arctic Ocean

“I don't care if your the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the inventor of the microchip, a bankable movie star, or an ordinary Joe or Jill, you're no paragon in my book, but the same as a zebra or gazelle - a source of protein. In fact, I'd rather hunt you, because you're slow and feeble.”
― Philip Caputo, Ghosts of Tsavo: Stalking the Mystery Lions of East Africa

“That is what I wanted, to find in a commonplace world a chance to live heroically. Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War

“The plotting he’d had to do to come to this point had exhausted Kidman’s capacity for calculation; his natural, impulsive violence was regaining the upper hand.”
― Philip Caputo, Hunter's Moon: A Novel in Stories

“when we marched into the rice paddies on that damp March afternoon, we carried, along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the Viet Cong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing something altogether noble and good. We kept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost.”
― Philip Caputo, A Rumor Of War