Archive photo of the day
From the archives: John Steinbeck talks to service members in South Vietnam, 1966
Stars and Stripes
February 14, 2026
(Ray Belford/Stars and Stripes)
An Khe, Vietnam, December 1966: Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck speaks to a small group of enlisted men.
Steinbeck laughed along when he was asked about a question raised by a popular national magazine: Is the United States locked in a hopeless war?
"That is a most ridiculous question," he said. "All wars are hopeless, but all of the wars have been necessary and this one is also necessary," Steinbeck said.
Steinbeck was in Vietnam to write about the war. “I won’t be writing about the technical side of the war or anything like that. I don’t have the time to learn all that I would need to know about it. It would take the rest of my lifetime to do such a thing,” he said. “I am only going to write my impressions of the war and I don’t have any deadlines or any assignments to write about.”
Read the original 1966 article here.