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Quotes About Vietnam

I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.
~ Helmut Schmidt
I can remember when President Nixon basically said, 'All troops have been withdrawn from the delta.' And I said, 'Wait, I'm still here.'
~ Rodney Frelinghuysen
The boys that were running away from America because they didn't want to get involved with the Vietnam War had come to me. They would tell me how they felt.
~ Eartha Kitt
I think the new generations in America, the America's youth, no longer care about Vietnam. They don't want to hear any more about it.
~ Alexander Haig
With all my traveling around the world I would say that South Vietnam was not as corrupted as people want to talk about it because it is a matter of degrees.
~ Bui Diem
We sent him to school for him to take this heavy equipment. I worked and cooked over at the school, helped send him there. I said, "I'm not sendin' you to school to come out here and go to work for these strip mines." I'd rather see him in Vietnam than see him doin' strip jobs.
~ Studs Terkel
Esta gaviota vuela sobre el eterno cielo de Hanoi, como antes volaba el agresivo B-52. (de En El País de Vietnam)
~ Nancy Morejón
Oh, claro Vietnam, si cae la bomba sobre el mar lleva tu árbol y tu escudo hasta la puerta del país. Ciérrala firme. (de En El País de Vietnam)
~ Nancy Morejón
1963 when President Diêm passed a law prohibiting his people from celebrating the Buddhist national holiday, many Vietnamese have understandably associated Christianity with foreign attempts to establish political and cultural domination.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Going After Cacciato
~ Thomas C. Foster
According to intelligence contacts of Sauncho's, it had been common CIA practice for a while to put Nixon's face on phony North Vietnamese bills, as part of a scheme to destabilize the enemy currency by airdropping millions of these fakes during routine bombing raids over the north. But Nixonizing U.S. currency this way was not as easily explained, nor sometimes even appreciated.
~ Thomas Pynchon
In the late sixties the armed forces switched from military ID numbers to social security numbers. But for several years they printed both, just to be safe." Dramatic pause. "That occurred only during the Vietnam War.
~ Kathy Reichs
Radio messages report rampant rumors of Khmer Rouge attacks. There is a curfew imposed at dusk. Every corner along the main road is occupied by tanks and armored personnel carriers, soldiers everywhere. The road to Vietnam is crawling with military, and everyone is nervous. But rather than being afraid to go outside, I find it thrilling. I've stepped into a TV show and any misadventure can be undone with a flick of the remote.
~ Kenneth Cain
Why have the Soviets stood aside and allowed us to settle Berlin, Vietnam and the Middle East? One, because the United States is big, mean and tough as hell and they know it. Two, the obsession with peace in the USSR. Twenty million Russian people were killed during World War II. We must have the fear elements working, but also the hope element.
~ Carl Bernstein
Johnson signed on. He was resolved not to be "the president who saw Southern Asia go the way China went," he said. "I want [the South Vietnamese] to get off their butts and get out into those jungles and whip the hell out of some communists," he said. "And then I want 'em to leave me alone, because I've got some bigger things to do right here at home.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
McNamara leaned over to the microphone and tried to say "Vietnam muôn n?m," but, because he wasn't aware of the tonal difference, the crowd practically disintegrated on the cobblestones. What he was saying was something like "The little duck, he wants to lie down.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
During the 1930s, Ho remembered, his was "a voice crying in the wilderness." But through it all, one friend recalled, he remained "taut and quivering…with only one thought, his country, Vietnam.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
AS A NATION-STATE, Vietnam is younger than the United States. The S-shaped region we now know as Vietnam—stretching more than a thousand miles from China's southern border to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand—was not effectively united under a single ruler until 1802. In that year, a general who called himself Gia Long emerged from thirty years of civil war and established the Nguyen dynasty.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
In 1858, when the emperor had two missionaries executed, France sent a fleet to seize the port of Danang. French naval forces took Saigon the following year and then forced the emperor to cede the three surrounding provinces to them. Over the four decades that followed, French forces captured Hue and Hanoi and steadily extended their power and influence until the French colonial government could officially declare in 1900 that the "pacification of Indochina" was complete.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
On April 24, the CIA reported that Diem was about to ask that the number of American advisers be greatly reduced. "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam," President Kennedy privately told a friend that evening. "These people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at almost any point. But I can't give up a piece of territory like that to the communists and then get the people to reelect me.
~ Geoffrey C. Ward
The United States could well declare unilaterally that this stage of the Vietnam war is over—that we have "won" in the sense that our Armed Forces are in control of most of the field and no potential enemy is in a position to establish its authority over South Vietnam.
~ George Aiken
Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.
~ George Galloway
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.
~ Noam Chomsky
I built bridges and worked for the army and SAS in Vietnam and Zimbabwe. I also sold watches and Jaguars in the Philippines and Singapore. In 1977, I returned to civil engineering and was posted to Muscat.
~ Bob Christo