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Quotes About Vietnam

The Americans landed in Vietnam, were killed in Vietnam, and others have continued to come here without having good reasons.
~ Mark Bowden
the final toll of the Battle of Hue numbers well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest of the Vietnam War.
~ Mark Bowden
Enemy morale has not been broken—he apparently has adjusted to our stopping his drive for military victory and has adopted a strategy of keeping us busy and waiting us out (a strategy of attriting our national will). He knows that we have not been, and he believes we probably will not be, able to translate our military successes into the 'end products'—broken enemy morale and political achievements by the GVN [government of Vietnam].
~ Mark Bowden
He was disappointed on his first Vietnam tour in 1965 when he'd seen little action. Now, with his own company, he was eager to be put to use. His ears stuck out on either side of his high-and-tight and he wore US Marine Corps–issued glasses in thick black plastic frames. In his wallet, he carried a formal portrait of his wife, Missy, and daughter, Marianne, both wearing pink. The politics of the war didn't concern him at all. He was a marine; there was a war on.
~ Mark Bowden
She had joined the Viet Cong herself four years earlier, its Young Pioneer Organization.
~ Mark Bowden
the entire rationale for fighting in Vietnam was rooted in faith. Faith that his elected leaders and military bosses knew what they were doing and that the calculation that had placed his life at such peril mattered, that it did more than just make sense but demanded his suffering and sacrifice.
~ Mark Bowden
He was so out of step with the youthful antiwar fervor of the period that he enlisted in the army at the height of the Vietnam War, only to be thrown out for lying about his age, education, and criminal past.
~ Mark Bowden
The Geneva Accords called for elections in 1956 to reunite the country. But as it became apparent that Ho's Communist government had overwhelming popular support—Eisenhower later estimated that if the elections had been held in 1954, Ho would have captured 80 percent of the vote13—South Vietnam's president, Ngo Dinh Diem, reneged on the election. The United States, which had not been a party to the Geneva Accords, continued to back Diem
~ Mark Bowden
She told them that the peace and freedom promised by the nguy and their American controllers was illusory. Their country was at war and would remain at war until the invaders and traitors were gone. The real Vietnam would rise she said. It would be united. She envisioned a future where the free Vietnamese people worked together to improve life for all.
~ Mark Bowden
Linh has informed me of something called 'fox' coffee, ca-phe-chon, a brew made from the tenderest beans, fed to a fox (though I have since seen it referred to as a weasel), and the beans later recovered from the animal's stool, washed (presumably), roasted, and ground. Sounds good to me.
~ Anthony Bourdain
In early May 1968, RT Lion was joined by a wiry, tough-as-nails little paratrooper who introduced himself as Lou "Jake Three Zero" DeSeta. DeSeta had served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade for 13 months and had participated in the fabled Battle of Dak To.
~ John Meyer
I would think somebody like Jane Fonda and her idiot husband would be terribly ashamed and saddened that they were a part of causing us to stop helping the South Vietnamese. Now look what's happening. They're getting killed by the millions. Murdered by the millions. How the hell can she and her husband sleep at night?
~ John Wayne
I'm not going to say I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I'm going to say I'm opposed to war. But I'm also opposed to protests that deny other people their rights.
~ John Wooden
Well, look at what people are doing for returned veterans now. The wounded warriors. They're working hard to make the wounded veterans feel that they are loved and welcomed home, unlike Vietnam. It was not a very kind, gentle world then. I think we are kinder and gentler.
~ Barbara Bush
The follies that produced the loss of American virtue following Vietnam begin with continuous overreacting, in the invention of endangered national security, the invention of vital interest, the invention of a commitment which rapidly assumed a life of its own .
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
had said, "The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.
~ Barbara W. Tuchman
In the last decade, most of her friends—even those who'd not gone to war—had let the concept of God be beaten away in torrents of Vietnamese rain, burned in the jungles, or obliterated in a blast that claimed a village. A world of such atrocities could not be under the jurisdiction of a compassionate God, and who wanted to believe in an uncompassionate God?
~ Gian Sardar
Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It's time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.
~ Michael Cimino
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
~ J. G. Ballard
The entire Detroit music community was opposed to the Vietnam war, racism, and every other right-wing idea we butted heads with, and we were all for human rights. When I heard soul music, I didn't hear racism. I heard music, and I liked it.
~ Scott Morgan
My favorite movie of all time is probably Apocalypse Now.
~ Dominic Monaghan
As I now see it, America had no business involving itself in a series of distant convulsions where the ideas, variously interpreted, of a long-dead German economist were bringing biblical calamity to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
~ Martin Amis
I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you did 'Nam, brother, no payment at all. You already paid up in full." —
~ Stephen Hunter