April 10, 2010 Dispatches
“He had one of those faces, I saw that face at least a thousand times at a hundred bases and camps, all the youth sucked out of the eyes, the color drawn from the skin, cold white lips, you knew he wouldn’t wait for any of it to come back. Life had made him old, he’d live it out old. All those faces, sometimes it was like looking into the faces at a rock concert, locked in, the event had them; or like students who were very heavily advance, serious beyond what you’d call their years if you didn’t know for yourself what the minutes and hours of those years were made up of. Not just like all the ones who looked like they couldn’t drag their asses through another day of it. (How do you feel when a nineteen-year-old kid tells you from the bottom of his heart that he’s gotten too old for this kind of shit?) Not like the faces of the dead or wounded either, they could look more released than overtaken. These were the faces of boys whose whole lives seemed to have backed up on them, they’d be a few feet away but they’d be looking back at you over a distance you knew you’d never really cross.”
Tags: Books, Michael Herr, Quote, Vietnam
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