A Quote by David Douglas Duncan
I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'
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It wasn't something I started off in my teens or early twenties thinking I want to be a war correspondent. I still don't think of myself as a war correspondent. I'm not. I'm a foreign correspondent.
I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.
Initially, I tried to become an aid worker and someone who could help people, but I was unsuccessful in convincing anyone that I could be of any use. So I went and became a war correspondent without any experience in war or in being a correspondent. So that was daring.
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off - what - twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?
With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.
When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die.
My father was a little frightening - a huge man, six foot four - and he looked like God. He was always a visitor, as far as I was concerned, because my parents separated when I was nine. We only became friends when he was old and began to shrink. During the war, he was a BBC war correspondent and did some extraordinary broadcasts.
Again, in Wag the Dog, war has to be declared by an act of congress. But if you go to war, you don't have to declare war. You're just at war and we did that, which is not legal.
War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
War is a lie. War is a racket. War is hell. War is waste. War is a crime. War is terrorism. War is not the answer.
I did not believe in the war. I thought it was wrong to go into any war. And I got to the war, and saw the Germans, and I changed my mind. I decided we were right going into World War II.
The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism.
I have to admit that the empty prestige and the stupid glory - yes, the horrible rush, the deadly sense of importance that war brings to life - are hard illusions to shake off. Look at me, a war correspondent.
As a war correspondent and a mother, I've learned to live in two different realities... but it's my choice. I choose to live in peace and witness war - to experience the worst in people but to remember the beauty.
We are constantly trying to cope with what our fathers or our grandfathers did. I wrote the book 'Great War of Civilization,' and my father was a solider in the First World War which produced the current Middle East - not that he had much to do with that - but he fought in what he believed was the Great War for Civilization.
I'm not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.
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