Literary Wisdom (ongoing)
4/30/2026
“The machine guns are exchanging a steady fire now, like old friends having a conversation. Thumps and thuds puncture the rhythm of the bullets. The snipers zero in on us. Each shot becomes a word spoken by death. Death is talking to us. Death wants to tell us a funny secret. We may not like death but death likes us.
Guns tell the truth. Guns never say, "I'm only kidding." War is ugly because the truth can be ugly and war is very sincere.’’
- GUSTAV HASFORD (The Short-Timers)
“The novel is semi-autobiographical; Hasford served as a Marine combat correspondent in Vietnam. The Short-Timers was the primary source material for Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket (co-written by Kubrick, Hasford, and Michael Herr). The same poetic narration also appears in the published screenplay.”