" Though I had hated that war with my body and soul, I realized sitting there that Vietnam was still my war. I had blamed it for the great unraveling it had brought to America, the self-doubt, the breakdown of courtesy, the death of form, and the falling apart of all the old truths and the integrity of both law and institutions. Everything came up for grabs. Nothing survived the cut. The facile and the cheap became celebrated and the speech of idiots took on a benighted, kingly quality. Solidity was a concept found only in physics textbooks. Indifference took center stage and it was hard to believe "

― Pat Conroy , Beach Music