Quotes About Conflict

The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government - Lyndon Johnson's best and brightest - imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.

In Vietnam, we took a hill and defeated the enemy; then we retreated and let the enemy take over.

Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East.

From Vietnam's 'Deer Hunter' to Iraq, films are never about the person who has had his house destroyed.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

The U.S. never lost a battle against North Vietnam, but it lost the war.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

Since 1945, no one in the U.S. military has liked the end result of the military conflicts we've been in: Vietnam, Korea, certainly Iraq, and probably Afghanistan. But in a democracy, you salute.

My father wanted to be a hero. He went to the Air Force Academy, was valedictorian, and then he found himself strafing villagers in Vietnam in a war he didn't want to be in and didn't understand. He was extremely conflicted about the line where he went from being the good guy to possibly being the bad guy.

In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like 'Sands of Iwo Jima' and there was this, you know - after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.

Vietnam affected everything in life while it went on. My time in the service made it clear to me that what we were being told in our newspapers and newscasts, back in the States, wasn't half the story of what was really going on.

Yes, Obama took over two wars from Bush - just as President Richard Nixon inherited Vietnam from President Lyndon Johnson and President Dwight Eisenhower inherited Korea from President Harry Truman. But at least the war in Iraq was all but won by 2009, thanks largely to the very surge Obama had opposed as a senator.

When I was growing up, it was a bad time to be in the military. It was the time of Vietnam, but I was never called up.

Vietnam was a terrible mistake for the United States. But like Iraq, Vietnam was a badly chosen battlefield in a larger conflict with totalitarianism that America had no choice but to pursue.

If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.

My parents are both war veterans; they met in Vietnam. They were involved in a war that they absolutely disagreed with.

In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty.

If the U.S. has its Vietnam... the Soviet Union has its Czechoslovakia. If the U.S. has its blacks and chicanos, then the Soviets have their Jews.

I'm from the Vietnam generation.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

The Vietnam War was causing people to get drafted; I had received a deferment to finish my undergraduate education, and in order to continue to get a deferment, you had to go to graduate school.

Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.