Brian

“but for me—a fast-growing thirteen-year-old—the most alarming thing was when we sat down to our first meal. I couldn’t believe the dish that appeared in front of me. They served us dog meat. Yes, dog meat. The stench was overpowering.”
― Masaji Ishikawa, A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

“this act is engraved in my mind deeper than any other experience in my two tours in Vietnam. A huge black enlisted man, clad only in shorts and boots, hands bigger than dinner plates, reached into my helicopter to pick up one of the dead white soldiers. He had tears streaming down his face and he tenderly cradled that dead soldier to his chest as he walked slowly from the aircraft to the medical station.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam

“Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn’t feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren’t too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“Then it came across the radio: Bravo Company had found one other survivor from our 2nd Platoon. He had been badly wounded in the legs and had propped himself up against a tree. He had been burned by napalm, waiting in the night, and some North Vietnamese had put a pistol to his eye and pulled the trigger. Shot him in the eye, blinded him, but he was still alive! I saw him being brought in on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette, all fucked up.”
― Harold G. Moore, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young: Ia Drang-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam