Quotes About Vietnam

We should draft dogs," he said. "People would say, 'But I love my dog; I wouldn't send him to Vietnam. He might get killed.

in 1971 New York City had more murders than American combat deaths in Vietnam during the same period.

The difference, I think, is that in Vietnam, people seem to have no choice about the kind of house they live in. They may want to fix the roof, but they can't do much about it, so they fight each other for a dry spot on the floor away from all the leaks.

BOHICA: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. A Vietnam War–era phrase that has lasted for decades, meaning those folks in the field—military or intelligence—are going to be the sacrificial lambs once again to protect the ones issuing orders.

I am not going to lose Vietnam, he said. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.2 For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply Johnson's War.3

For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.92

In its broadest sense, the scandal of Watergate arose from the tumultuous and destabilizing trends of the 1960s, especially the war in Vietnam and the deviousness and power-grabbing associated with the rise of an imperial presidency.2

The significance of LBJ's personal traits accounted for the growing belief, especially by anti-war activists, that Vietnam was Johnson's War. His critics are correct in pointing to the role of these traits and in arguing that Johnson, commander-in-chief until 1969, possessed the ultimate power to stem the tide of escalation. He was the last, best, and only chance for the United States to pull itself out of the quagmire.

Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968—they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school.

Emmy Lou Harris introduced me to the work of the Vietnam Veterans of America foundation and the Campaign for a Land Mine Free World.

We're not going to lose it. That's all there is to it," Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. "We can't lose. We can lose an election, but we're not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.

A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back.

It seemed that twenty-five thousand Chicanos had marched down Whittier Boulevard. But what had started as a protest against the burning of peasants in Vietnam turned into a massive public declaration by fire of their own existence

Today there is a growing struggle over sovereignty in the South China Sea—over who controls the Spratlys, as well as another island group closer to China and Vietnam called the Paracels, and other tiny "land features" that barely jut out from the waves—and indeed the sea itself.

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.

The Vietnam war was wrong, rotten to the core. But the military, the government, the police, big business were all congealing in my view into a single, opressive mass -- The System, The Man. These were standard issue youth politics at the time, of course, and I was soon folding school authorities into the enemy force. And my casual, even contemptuous attitude toward the law was mostly a holdover from childhood, when a large part of glory was defiance and what you could get away with.

He said they'd been done in by the Beatles, so the food riots hadn't had to happen. The Beatles and losing their own Vietnam.

O'Neill was perceptive enough to understand the country had a new leader that it wanted to believe in. After the tragedy of Dallas, after the quicksand of Vietnam, the scandal of Watergate, and the "malaise" of Jimmy Carter, it needed one.

The $1 Airlift, another of Stevan Dohanos's designs, was specially issued in April 1968 for families sending parcels to U.S. servicemen in Vietnam, a conflict that by that time had become hopelessly out of control and was dividing the nation as profoundly as the issue of race.

By 1971, 58 percent of Americans had concluded that the war in Vietnam was not just a mistake, but immoral.

new mainstream consensus emerged around the idea that the Vietnam War had primarily been an American tragedy that had badly wounded and divided the nation. The focus was on healing, not history.

Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.

Somewhere along the way I came upon a mews with a small sign on the entrance gate addressed to the passing world. The sign orders flatly: COMMIT NO NUISANCE The more you stare at that, the more territory it covers. From dirtying the streets to housebreaking to invading Viet Nam, that covers all the territory there is.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. —John Le Carré