Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.
I would say healthcare in Vietnam is so-so. There are several international clinics that are good but expensive and the care offered is limited.
I don't judge anybody who chose not to serve during Vietnam, at all. It's a different time, and I don't judge anybody for the decision they made.
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
Newsman are the ones who - without them we don't have a civil rights movement, we don't have a women's movement, we don't have a Vietnam movement.
I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so.
I get very sad when I think about Vietnam where there seems to be no choice but violence. This violence goes on for centuries perpetuating itself.
I was caught up in the hysteria during the Vietnam era, which was brought about through Marxist propaganda underlying the so-called peace movement.
I gave up my children to an American couple and went to Vietnam on an army assignment where I helped soldiers identify and get rid of hidden mines.
There's no service ribbon for people who fought in Korea. We lost over 30,000 men between 1951 and 1953 - as many as we lost in 15 years in Vietnam.
All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.
Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.
Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.
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.
I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn't go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.
Withdrawal of American troops must be a unilateral act, as the invasion of Vietnam by the American government was a unilateral act in the first place.
Experience helped Richard Nixon, but it didn't save him, and it certainly wasn't a blanket endorsement. He blundered terribly in dealing with Vietnam.
The most powerful Vietnam movie, to me, was 'The Deer Hunter,' which was more about what happened to the folks who went and about their relationships.
Vietnam, really more accurately, Laos, was almost after Berlin the top problem at the beginning of the Kennedy Administration in '61, foreign problem.
I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
I only had, like, 4 CDs when I was in college, and one of them was the soundtrack to 'Good Morning Vietnam' - that's how much I don't know about music.
In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.
It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
I got involved in the political arena in college, protesting the Vietnam War, and became friends with some of the activists at the University of Hawaii.
By Vietnam, the Jeep had given way to the helicopter, and it is hard to imagine a modern army fighting a war without this supremely adaptable workhorse.
Back in the old Corp, we weren't training those privates to infiltrate into the peacetime Marine Corp. We were training those privates to go to Vietnam.
There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.
Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.
Neither Johnson nor his party nor the government as a whole were willing to raise, train, equip, and then send Vietnam sufficient manpower to do the job.
I used to love going into local hardware stores, to look at little things they made locally. Nowadays it's harder, though you can still do it in Vietnam.
Under Malcolm Fraser's Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.
[democrats] hated Richard Nixon, and no wonder. It was Nixon who sent Alger Hiss to jail, and Nixon who waged the Vietnam War after the Democrats gave up.
What is in the Constitution is the burning desire and aspiration of all the people of Vietnam. So for the moment, we don't think about opposition parties.
The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.
I wore the cloth of the nation for over 31 years in peace and war, from the Vietnam and Cold War eras, to Afghanistan and Iraq, and the emergence of China.
I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.
When I was younger, my dad taught me how to cook. He's a genius in the kitchen. I went to Vietnam with my parents, and I went on a cooking course with him.
As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.
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.
But despite their heroic acts, the Vietnam Veterans of America continued to struggle to establish a combat badge in honor of these brave pilots and medics.
Certainly the Australians were buried in Korea. But I think that from Vietnam on, all the killed were brought home to America or to Australia, in our case.
Our numbers have increased in Vietnam because the aggression of others has increased in Vietnam. There is not, and there will not be, a mindless escalation.
I was lost, and that war [in Vietnam] was very alienating - not that I was against it or for it, but I was just lost after that war. As were many Americans.
I would not trade you a billion dollars for the kids I led to combat in Vietnam or in fact any of the Marines that I served with for a quarter of a century.
I formed the hypothesis that each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life. And I wanted to test that by going to Vietnam.
With all my traveling around the world I would say that South Vietnam was not as corrupted as people want to talk about it because it is a matter of degrees.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
I'm a very brave person. I can go to North Vietnam, I can challenge my government, but I can't challenge the man I'm with if means I'm going to end up alone.
Vietnam ended a failure: repeatedly, to me, Kissinger described it as his greatest, and most persistent regret. But Congress was more to blame than Kissinger.