Quotes About Saigon

Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Thus the portrait of McNamara in those years at his desk, on planes, in Saigon, poring over page after page of data, each platoon, each squad, studying all those statistics. All lies. Talking with reporters and telling them that all the indices were good. He could not have been more wrong; he simply had all the wrong indices, looking for American production indices in an Asian political revolution.

Yes, I was born in London because my dad was closing out the West End version of Miss Saigon' there.

Imagine that -- a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them -- and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you're going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began!

Mohr quoted Westmoreland, after the general had toured the bullet-riddled embassy grounds in Saigon, saying the enemy's efforts had failed, and that they had sought "to cause maximum consternation in South Vietnam." "It was clear that consternation had been achieved," Mohr wrote.19

There were splits within families over the present war, where one son had sided with Saigon and the other with Hanoi. The "liberation" of Hue suspended law and order and upended basic decency, giving retribution an official stamp of approval. It tapped a deep vein of savagery. In

Tran Thi Thu Van, the writer from Saigon, spent those weeks wandering in the wasteland of the battle trying to stay alive. She would later record scene after scene of horror in her book Mourning Headband for Hue.

Saigon is hot, full of atmosphere, activity, and commerce.

We wanted to see this country win the war just as much as those advisors did. We felt we would help to do that by reporting the truth. And so there was the moral outrage over this general and the ambassador in Saigon who kept denying the truth we would see.

From early on, important segments of the movement against the American involvement in Southeast Asia were not so much antiwar as they were partisans of Hanoi, whose victory they sought to hasten through achieving an America withdrawal from Vietnam. Given the fragility of the Saigon government and the dependence of the South Vietnamese armed forces on American assistance, none could have any illusion about the effects of this policy. The New Left, too, soon came to favor a victory of Hanoi.

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?' I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.' 'What did you want?' 'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.' 'That's all?' 'Yes.

Saigon in utter darkness this last night of the war. A gestating monster. Her letter to Linh had been simple: I love you more than life, but I had to see the end.

That'll put us about a hundred miles due east of Ho Chi Minh City in another five hours." The name always caught Max off guard. Vietnam's largest city would always be Saigon to him.

In 1975, the Americans suffered a spectacular military defeat at the hands of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, with U.S. helicopters seeking to rescue leading U.S. personnel from the tops of buildings as Vietnamese guerrillas closed in on the centre of Saigon.

One question: would you have called buying pastel linen dresses for Saigon a mark of 'privilege'? Or would you have called it more a mark of bone stupidity?

Lana was not above socializing with a common man, and for the next hour they became partners on a walk down memory lane, reminiscing about Saigon and songs while I quietly quaffed my cognac, discreetly admiring Lana's legs. Longer than the Bible and a hell of a lot more fun, they stretched forever, like an Indian yogi or an American highway shimmering through the Great Plains or the southwestern desert.

Bang bang was the sound of memory's pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon.

Vietnam to defend democracy, and remembers me responding that the Saigon regime was no democracy.

Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you'd get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections. ?

North and South Vietnam were meant to be reunified in national elections two years later, but Saigon—with Washington's support—reneged.