Excerpt from John Kerry's Vietnam diary, featured in Dec. 2003 Atlantic Monthly.

"It seemed to utterly crazy-- the idea of all this modern equipment fighting for an ideal than meant everything to those who were fighting but that could so obviously mean nothing to those... whom the fighting was supposedly for. I know it is easy to be emotional, but I can't help getting the feeling that their faces say to go away and let us alone."

"It was when one of your men got hit or you got hit yourself that you felt most absurd-- that was when everything had to have meaning in order for it to be all worthwhile and inevitably Vietnam just didn't have any meaning. It didn't meet the test..."

"I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene. I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn't see what I was firing at and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile while they went down to Schrafft's and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account. And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was."