Karl Marlantes quotes from The Vietnam War

(opening lines) Coming home from Vietnam, was almost as traumatic as the war itself. For years, no one mentioned Vietnam. We were friends with a young couple, it was only after 12 years that the two wives were talking, found out we had both been Marines in Vietnam. Never said a word about it. And the whole country was like that. It was so divisive. It's like living in a family with an alcoholic father, "Shh, we don't talk about that." Our country did that with Vietnam, and it's only been recently that the Baby Boomers have been asking, "What happened? What happened?"

One of the things that I learned in the war is that we're not the top species on the planet because we're nice. We are a very aggressive species; it is in us. People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines, and I'll always argue that it's just finishing school. What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies, and we have to recognize them. I worry about a whole country that doesn't recognize them, because think of how many times we get ourselves into scrapes as a nation because we're always the 'good guys'. Sometimes, I think if we thought we weren't always the good guys, we might actually get into less wars.

Combat is like crack cocaine. It's an enormous high, but it has enormous costs. Any sane person would never do crack. Combat is like that. You're scared, you're terrified, you're miserable, but then the fighting starts, and suddenly everything is at stake, your life, your friend's lives. It's almost transcendence because you're no longer a person. You lose that sense, you're just the platoon, and the platoon can't be beat. And not to mention there's a savage joy in overcoming your enemy, just a savage joy. And I think we make a big mistake if we say, 'oh war is hell'. We all know the 'war is hell' story—it is—but there's an enormously exhilarating part of it.