War & Peace Quote by Neil Sheehan

War here isn’t a memory; it’s a career-long gravitational field. Neil Sheehan frames Vietnam less as a subject he chose than as a historical force that chose him, and that inversion is the quote’s quiet punchline. He’s careful to reject the easy psychological story - “obsession” - because that would reduce a generational rupture to private fixation. Instead, he offers a journalist’s explanation that doubles as an indictment: the war became the event that organized an era, and once a reporter is assigned to the era’s organizing event, everything else starts to feel like a footnote.

The subtext is about how institutions and history draft people. “I started out covering it so I stayed with it” sounds casual, almost procedural, but it captures the way beats become identities. For Sheehan, Vietnam wasn’t simply a conflict to report; it was the machine that produced the documents, lies, casualties, and moral vertigo that made his most consequential work possible, including his role in bringing the Pentagon Papers to light and later writing A Bright Shining Lie. The line implies that leaving would have meant abandoning not just a story but a responsibility: if this was “the event of my generation,” then staying with it is a form of fidelity to the public record.

Context matters: Vietnam was also the war that shattered official credibility and remade American journalism into a more adversarial, document-driven enterprise. Sheehan’s sentence reads like a personal memoir, but it’s really a diagnosis of how a nation’s trauma can harden into a lifelong assignment.