At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

I think you have to remember that Americans saw their purpose as so innately good that they could excuse the pain they would inflict on others to carry out those purposes. Because the purposes were so good, they would justify this pain we were inflicting on other people.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

Just because you put higher-octane gasoline in your car doesn't mean you can break the speed limit. The speed limit's still 65.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

People talked to me in a way I think they would not have talked to somebody who hadn't shared the experience; they gave me their papers, they gave me their diaries. I found people constantly opening up to me. And I think they did because I had shared that experience with them.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

We thought that whatever we wanted to do was right and good, simply because we were Americans, and we would succeed at it because we were Americans.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.
- Neil Sheehan Quote

World War II had been such a tremendous success story for this country that the political and military leadership began to assume that they would prevail simply because of who they were. We were like the British at the turn of the 19th century.
- Neil Sheehan Quote