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Quotes About Vietnam

We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
~ Harold G. Moore
Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy and
~ Harold G. Moore
Then it came across the radio: Bravo Company had found one other survivor from our 2nd Platoon. He had been badly wounded in the legs and had propped himself up against a tree. He had been burned by napalm, waiting in the night, and some North Vietnamese had put a pistol to his eye and pulled the trigger. Shot him in the eye, blinded him, but he was still alive! I saw him being brought in on a stretcher, smoking a cigarette, all fucked up.
~ Harold G. Moore
Lady, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?" This film came out at the height of the Vietnam War. I love that line. That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way. And bleeding. Shooting and bleeding.
~ Haruki Murakami
My own people, the South Vietnamese, had been bombing trade routes used by the Viet Cong rebels. I had not been targeted, of course. I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
~ Phan Thi Kim Phuc
When I first got back from the war, I said, 'I'm gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.' So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
~ Karl Marlantes
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
~ Tracy Kidder
Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, lions and tigers alike -- I would swap the whole damn zoo for the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.
~ SPIRO AGNEW
the cover of Land Speed Record is a photo of the coffins of the first eight soldiers killed in Vietnam; like many punks, the members of Hüsker Dü actually agreed with Sixties counterculture values but despised the hippies for selling out those values. "We're doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the Sixties," Mould said, "but the way they did it didn't work.
~ Michael Azerrad
Was a dead Vietnamese in civilian clothes part of the enemy forces? Officers started to make up numbers to give their superiors the body count they wanted.
~ Michael Barone
Non… Gratum… Anum… Ro—' I can't make that out." "Rodentum," Bosch said. Sakai looked at him. "Dog Latin," Bosch told him. "Not worth a rat's ass. He was a tunnel rat. Vietnam.
~ Michael Connelly
sidewalls and a military cut. Long hair provided cover. Bosch had done it himself twice during his time in-country, returning to L.A. to spend five days
~ Michael Connelly
I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
~ Michael Herr
Anyway, you couldn't use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along, the turnaround point where it would touch and come back to form a containing perimeter; might just as well lay it on the proto-Gringos who found the New England woods too raw and empty for their peace and filled them up with their own imported devils.
~ Michael Herr
The signs of the Vietnam War protestors said "Make Love not War!" It didn't seem to me that they were capable of either.
~ Ronald Reagan
After Vietnam and Watergate, and later the advent of twenty-four-hour cable news, journalism became noticeably more subjective and judgmental.18 Coverage was focused more on mediating what public people were saying than simply reporting it.
~ Bill Kovach
Then we went into the A Shau. That was fucked.
~ Bob Mayer
In Vietnam today there is a My Lai Museum. Hersh visited it in early 2015 for The New Yorker and noted the names and ages of the victims listed on a marble plaque. The count of the dead is no longer in dispute: a total of 504 people from 247 families; 24 families lost everyone—three generations, no survivors. Included in the 504 were 60 elderly men, and 282 women (17 of whom were pregnant). A total of 173 children were killed; 53 were infants.
~ Bob Woodward
K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.
~ Bob Woodward
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
~ June Jordan
It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)
~ Junot Diaz
Motherfucker was like three hundred years old, but because he had a car and a record collection and foto albums from his Vietnam days and because he bought her clothes to replace the old shit she was wearing, Nilda was all lost on him.
~ Junot Diaz
We were marching since we were babies and all we did was make Jane Fonda famous.
~ Robert Patrick
President Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the lost of many lives in the course of it.
~ Daniel Ellsberg