Dwight Birdwell

“When I had flown in sixteenth months earlier, the view from above was of a green paradise. The landscape we swept over on the way out had been shelled, bombed, napalmed, and defoliated spreading cancerlike through virtually every village, every rice paddy, every patch of woods. There were craters everywhere, craters of all sizes, craters that overlapped one another, and I was brokenhearted by the extent of the destruction. We had come and laid waste, but we had not conquered. It was difficult to believe we had accomplished anything at all.”
― Dwight Birdwell, A Hundred Miles of Bad Road: An Armored Cavalryman in Vietnam, 1967-68