"I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war"
About this Quote
A clean newsroom sentence that lands like a life sentence. Neil Sheehan frames Vietnam not as a chapter but as a gravitational field: you don’t leave it, you orbit it. The bluntness of “my first assignment” matters. It strips away romance about the young correspondent as adventurer and replaces it with institutional machinery: UPI sends you, the war receives you, and the rest of your life is shaped in the collision.
“I never could get away” reads on two levels at once. Literally, Vietnam-era reporting was a churn of redeployments, repeat tours, editors hungry for the next dispatch. Psychologically, it names the aftershock that follows witnesses home: images that recur, moral math that never resolves, the nagging sense that whatever you do afterward is still footnoted by what you saw. For a journalist, “getting away” also means escaping the story’s claim on you. Sheehan didn’t. His career became a long argument with Vietnam’s official narrative, culminating in his role bringing the Pentagon Papers into public view and, later, writing A Bright Shining Lie, a book built from years of return trips and ethical scrutiny.
The line’s subtext is a quiet indictment of how wars conscript observers. The state drafts bodies; the conflict drafts attention, language, conscience. Sheehan admits what the era’s swagger often hid: the war wasn’t just something he covered. It made a permanent assignment out of him.
“I never could get away” reads on two levels at once. Literally, Vietnam-era reporting was a churn of redeployments, repeat tours, editors hungry for the next dispatch. Psychologically, it names the aftershock that follows witnesses home: images that recur, moral math that never resolves, the nagging sense that whatever you do afterward is still footnoted by what you saw. For a journalist, “getting away” also means escaping the story’s claim on you. Sheehan didn’t. His career became a long argument with Vietnam’s official narrative, culminating in his role bringing the Pentagon Papers into public view and, later, writing A Bright Shining Lie, a book built from years of return trips and ethical scrutiny.
The line’s subtext is a quiet indictment of how wars conscript observers. The state drafts bodies; the conflict drafts attention, language, conscience. Sheehan admits what the era’s swagger often hid: the war wasn’t just something he covered. It made a permanent assignment out of him.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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