I doze, made drowsy by the beers, and when I wake to find the windows filling with November’s early dark I have a memory of nonsense, drifted through my thoughts while reason slept.

—Alan Moore

The Persian Gulf War didn’t last for six weeks, it lasted for 20 years. Vietnam is a Poltergeist through this whole thing. It had a psychological dimension as a consequence of Vietnam that transcended Saddam Hussein in the invasion of Kuwait somehow, in ways that made this war larger than it really was.

—Rick Atkinson