Quotes About Vietnam

I felt that I was witnessing the beginnings of a great sea change in America. I was deeply moved. Through this terrible ordeal of Vietnam, I believed, we might finally see America becoming what the founding fathers had envisioned, a nation with a moral purpose in the world and a nation that cared about all its citizens. We might see the end of the cynical Nixon-Kissinger version of realpolitik. It hasn't turned out that way, but then we are all a little older and wiser.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

I didn't see conflict during the Vietnam War, but I did lose close friends.

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.

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

America lost its face with the debacle of the Vietnam War.

Because our homeland and very survival are once more at stake, the American people can't afford to treat this new war against terrorism like they did Vietnam.

I simply told people what I thought about the state of the war in Vietnam, and it was that we better get out of this.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.

My parents are refugees from Vietnam, so they didn't grow up with 'Star Wars.' I don't think they know what's going on in the movie at any given time.

Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.

And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything - it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.

The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men.

One thing is clear, the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, something that is very rare in a person of his position.

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money." (On Vietnam War)

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

Johnson had been the most powerful man in the world, yet the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong had resisted, overcome his power, broken his will.

Nearly a quarter of American men were in the Armed forces [in 1968]. The rest were in school, in prison, or were George W. Bush.

While Keith Taylor, then, might dismiss questions of "whether Vietnam 'belongs' to Southeast Asia or [North] East Asia" as "probably the least enlightening in Vietnamese studies," it could equally be argued that it is precisely Vietnam's historical, geographical, and cultural location at the frontier of different, identifiable, and historically sedimented cultural formations that makes its situation so distinctive and interesting.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.