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I wouldn't want to go back to my 20s; they were pretty angst-laden times.

I was drafted when I was 17, and I spent two years, and I lost a friend in war.

With the draft, everybody was involved. Everybody was fodder. When you got to be 21, 22 and graduated from college, for two years your life stopped. If you had been running in the direction of your life, you had to stop and do this other thing which was, if not menacing, just plain boring.

No, I was two years older than the other guys. I was a war baby. My family were a lot poorer than they were. I'd had to fight too hard for anything I had in my life and to smash things up for me.

I believe that many of my young guys lived because I didn't waste their lives because I didn't have the vision in my mind of how to destroy the enemy at least cost to our guys and to the innocents on the battlefields.

I'd never left America until I was 18.

I was a very serious young man, very committed to saving the world.

With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.

From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.

I never got away from the war. Not because I was obsessed with it in those years, but because it was the event of my generation and I started out covering it so I stayed with it.