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Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.

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

The Vietnam War totally turned my life around. Some people's lives were eliminated or destroyed by the experience. I was one of the fortunate few who came out better off.

I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.

I've always been interested in Vietnam, feel it's a seminal event in our nation's history, and have explored it over the years - but I hadn't been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn't know if I could add anything new to the discussion.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

My opposition to the Vietnam War. I was the first Hollywood actor to speak out against it.

I think that Vietnam, many of us who served in Vietnam thought that was very wasteful, and to what end? To what end? What were we really there for? What were we really fighting for?

I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.