Quotes About Vietnam

So one important lesson of Vietnam is, the first casualty of an unwise and unjust war are the American troops called on to fight it. Their service should be honored.

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.

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.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society ... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we're now manufacturing discontent . It's the only way to prevent a popular uprising.

Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says "Bad war, good soldier." Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.

Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: 'Shit, man, he's the only boy we got out there.

The merits of rival causes are never absolute. Even in the Second World War, the Western allied struggle against fascism was compromised by its reliance upon the tyranny of Stalin to pay most of the blood price for destroying the tyranny of Hitler. Only simpletons of the political Right and Left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of virtue.

The main thing those Americans who really knew about Vietnam knew was how little they knew.

70 per cent to avoid a humiliating defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor) – 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life'.

But although Australia was also involved in the Vietnam conflict, I can remember my dad telling us that if we were in Australia, we wouldn't be drafted until we were 20.

Two best friends traveled from the Burdekin in North Queensland sometime in the 1960s and walked into the Union and fell in love with Grace. Tom finch was the smarter talker of the two and won first round, marrying her before his name came up in the lottery sending him to Vietnam on a tour of duty. He never returned. The heartbroken, patient one, Bill Mackee, grieved a best friend and married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old.

Before terminating at the Berlin Wall, the front in the Cold War ran through the hellish jungles of Vietnam to the oases and deceptively idyllic dunes of the Middle East.

I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody form his home town had been killed. He didn't even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. "I mean, can you just see *two* guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims.

There was a special Air Force outfit that flew defoliation missions. They were called the Ranch Hands, and their motto was, 'Only we can prevent forests.

and chicken bones for fossilized remains. A lifetime later I am building a world inside my head: I run down narrow staircases, dark halls and passageways, chased by the fear of forgetting. Inside a room is a diorama from deep time, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. In 1969, the year our mother's younger cousin, Philip, shipped out for Vietnam, and our father stopped sending us child support, I turned ten years

Hell no / I ain't going to go / Clean out my cell / And take my tail / To jail / Without bail / Because it's better there eating / Watching television fed / Than in Vietnam with your white folks dead.

I got nothing against no Viet Cong. No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.

I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger.

Lansdale was a victim in Vietnam of his success in the Phillipines. Men who succeed at an enterprise of great moment often tie a snare for themselves by assuming that they have discovered some universal truth.

Inflation was held to between 50 and 60 percent a year, mainly by more than doubling the commodity imports AID financed for the South Vietnamese economy ($ 650 million in 1966) and by shipping millions of tons of American rice to a country that had been able to export rice as recently as 1964.

Neil Sheehan