“The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever.”

“We grew up in places like Georgetown and Alexandria and Chevy Chase; we were flown in great thumping silver Pan American airplanes all the way to Rome, all the way to Greece, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Hamra, Cairo; we went to American Community Schools; we spent weekends swimming at the American Club.”

“He was in way over his head... We're held accountable for our stupidity & moral ignorance... Arrogant condescension...suffering from self-hatred which comes along with a terrible nostalgia for the way we imagine things were, the nostalgia of defeat...breeds tyrants... He can hold his liquor, I'll give him that. It's a generational skill,...indicative of a pathology.”

“Ivy League bumblers and drunks who had once pulled the levers of secret gov't in an age of high anxiety...These were the bastards who beat the bastards, unless it was all just dumb luck.”

“Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says “Bad war, good soldier.” Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.”

“Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.”

“Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century befire the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.”