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Vietnam War

armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, from 1955 to 1975

The Vietnam War, also known as the American War (by the Vietnamese) or the Second Indochina War, was a Cold War-era proxy war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from approximately 1 November 1955 (accounts differ) to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.

How could anyone genuinely believe that the South Vietnamese people had no desire to forestall the march of totalitarianism, to maintain their freedom- however imperfect- when for years upon years they bore incredible hardships and their soldiers fought with courage and determination to do just that? ~ William Westmoreland
"Well, who is going to win this war?" Patton snorted. "We will," the prisoner said forcefully, "because you will tire of it before we do." ~ Brian M. Sobel
The US intervention in Vietnam was not inevitable. It evolved from the vacuum left by the collapse of Japan's Asian Empire, followed by the communists' victory in China, the Korean stalemate, and France's defeat in 1954. But it also grew out of the Cold War decisions of three US presidents: Truman's to move away from Roosevelt's anticolonialism and back the French, Eisenhower's to block the Vietnamese national elections in 1956 and prop up the Diệm regime, and Kennedy's to increase the number of US military advisers, Special Forces, and CIA agents in South Vietnam. All three intended to transform Vietnam into a "proving ground for democracy in Asia." ~ Carole C. Fink
The irony is that we who served were patriotic then and, if anything, we are even more patriotic now. Still, I don't believe there was a single vet I interviewed who doesn't think the war was a monstrous mistake and that we were sold down the river by a long series of US Presidents and Washington politicians, few of whom ever served, fewer still let their own children serve, and none ever studied the history of the people and country where they chose to send us to bleed and die, because they were afraid to admit a mistake. ~ William F. Brown

This war followed the First Indochina War (1946–54) and was fought between North Vietnam—supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies—and the government of South Vietnam—supported by the United States and other anti-communist allies. The Viet Cong (also known as the National Liberation Front, or NLF), a South Vietnamese communist common front aided by the North, fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The People's Army of Vietnam (also known as the North Vietnamese Army) engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large units to battle. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 800,000 to 3.1 million. Some 200,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–200,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

A

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Intelligence on Vietcong positions and movements frequently arrived too late to be actionable, delayed in an information-processing infrastructure unable to treat all the data it was fed. And this despite the creation of an unprecedented telecommunications network in a field of operations,with electronic communications gear accounting for a third of all major items of equipment brought into the country and the first use of satellite communications for military purposes in 1965. ~ John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt
  • Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.
  • The AK-47 went head-to-head with the M-16, and emerged on the winning side.
    • Narration to the Top Ten Rifles presentation by the Military Channel (renamed American Heroes Channel in 2014), part of their Top Ten series which began in 2005.

B

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It seemed as if both sets of assholes were winning in 1968. The King assassination did, in fact, result in terrible riots; and the Vietnam War, despite its growing unpopularity, became the longest in American history, with more U.S. troops over there than ever, and more men being drafted, and no end in sight. ~ Dave Barry
 
Said goodbye to his momma as he left South Dakota
To fight for the red, white and blue
He was nineteen and green with a new M-16
Just doing what he had to do ~ Big & Rich
 
We each had our own war. But we did what our country asked of us. ~ Gary Baker
 
Between 1967 and 1972, the Air Force ran Operation Igloo White at the cost of nearly $1 billion a year. Through an array of sensors designed to record sound, heat, vibrations, and even the smell of urine, feeding information to a control centre in Thailand which sent on the resulting targeting information to patrolling jet aircraft (even the release of bombs could be controlled remotely), this vast cybernetic mechanism was designed to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and trails providing logistical support to the North Vietnamese. At the time, extravagant claims were made about the performance of the system with the reported number of destroyed trucks in 1970 exceeding the total number of trucks believed to be in all of North Vietnam. ~ Antoine Bosquet
  • In the Seattle airport, as I was arriving home after serving in Vietnam in 1968-1969, a gang of 10 to 20 strangers clustered in the terminal and shouted insults at me as I passed by in my uniform. At the time, I paid them little attention. I was swept up in living, at long last, the dream that had sustained me through the hell of war: I was coming home. I was touching U.S. soil for the first time. Besides, I simply could not appreciate the magnitude of what they were doing at the time. It never occurred to me that people could be so morally bankrupt that, devoid of any fortitude, they would substitute the safety of another's company and, together, attack individual young soldiers, who walked through the airport alone in the sacred moment of homecoming. The longer I was home, however, the more clearly I understood that my Seattle experience was no curious aberration. This was part of an organized effort by a large and vocal segment of our society to ridicule and demean traditional values and strength of character by ridiculing and demeaning those who believed in them.
    • Kenneth E. Baggett, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 222
  • There is a dangerous myth: That people like my persecutors in Seattle were just as courageous for resisting duty as the men who put their lives on the line. "Bring the boys home?" All I heard was, "Hell, no, we won't go." Why did all this supposedly courageous commitment to peace evaporate once the threat of being drafted was removed? Torture and wholesale massacre in Vietnam and Cambodia increased exponentially when the U.S. pulled out. Why were there no protests then? The answer, of course, is that commitment to peace was never the issue. Resisting service was. Figuratively, I have been "spat upon" countless times over the years, but not by hippies in airports. I am spat upon every time one of my countrymen prostitutes his values to perpetuate the myth that the easy, comfortable way out of a difficult time for our country was as "courageous" as making hard choices.
    • Kenneth E. Baggett, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 223
  • We changed planes in Denver and noticed that the general public was avoiding us. No thanks, no welcome home or anything, just stares and dirty looks. We didn't care; we were home. Our emotions were numb. We landed at the old downtown airport in Kansas City and put our duffle bags in storage lockers. They actually had those at airports back then. We got a taxi to Liberty, Missouri, but didn't have enough money between us to get all the way home to Excelsior. Didn't matter. We figured we could hitchhike. After all, we were in our Army uniforms, and figured someone would stop and offer us a ride. We were wrong. Cars went past honking and giving us one-finger salutes, one ran off the shoulder at us and made us dodge aside. Still, we didn't care, we were home.
    • Gary Baker, as quoted by William F. Brown in Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 271
  • I kept thinking things had changed since I left. My sister Debbie had gotten married. Many high school friends were away at college. I contacted them but they were still young, they didn't understand that I had changed. Some of the same people were still sitting on cars downtown and talking about things that really didn't matter to me anymore. It wasn't them that had changed; it was me. The transition from a war zone to Middle America was not easy. Still, I had that "1000-yard stare," loud noises made me jump, helicopters woke me up when they flew over the house, and I felt ten years older. Many others had a much harder time in Vietnam than I had. The Grunts, the wounded, the guys that didn't make it home. We each had our own war. But we did what our country asked of us.
    • Gary Baker, as quoted by William F. Brown in Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 271
  • I put the uniform away. I didn't talk about my experiences except with other Veterans. I didn't join the VFW, the American Legion, or any of the war protests that were still happening. I just wanted to be left alone and get busy with life. I was proud of my service even though the country didn't seem to be proud of us. I remember when I heard the news that Saigon had fallen. I was a Missouri State Trooper by then and I had to pull over to the road shoulder and stop. I kept wondering, "Why?" All those lives, all the wounded. America: two wins, one tie, one loss.
    Later, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I remember watching the "Welcome Home" shows. I got teary-eyed watching the surprise visits by soldiers to their kids' schools and the excitement in the families' eyes when they saw them. That is what homecomings are supposed to be like. I remember welcoming my Marine Corps son home from Afghanistan (twice), my sailor son came home after a deployment to the Middle East on the carrier, George H.W. Bush. I remember all the Patriot Guard missions to welcome home servicemen and women. I also remember the PGR missions for the KIAs (killed in action). Lives ended too soon.
    Less than 9% of the population has ever served in the military, around 3% have ever served in combat. Too many people are too wrapped up in the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, iPhones, tweets, fashion, or just daily life to consider the Veterans and active duty military. Next time you see someone wearing a Veteran ball cap or uniform, thank them for serving. They will appreciate it.
    • Gary Baker, as quoted by William F. Brown in Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 271-272
  • One more issue we had to deal with upon our return was our language. Over there, everything was fuck this, fuck that, fucking morning, fucking boots, fucking mud, fucking war. It was embedded in our language and it's how we talked; but it wasn't acceptable back in "The World." I remember the family got together after I returned. Most of my relatives were there; they were all visiting. I couldn't think of too much to say until my sister's cat jumped up on my lap. I don't like cats too much, and it dug its claws into my groin. I immediately yelled, "Fucking cat!" and knocked it across the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I knew then I would have to make some changes now that I was home. My sister laughed and said I impressed her with my control. She figured I would have just grabbed the cat and killed it. I heard of one Vet who had a similar experience. Everyone asked him why he was so quiet. Finally, he said, "I would have said something, but I was afraid I would fuck up."
    • Gary Baker, as quoted by William F. Brown in Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 272
  • I used to be a left-wing, antiestablishment, protest-oriented, march-on-Washington type of individual. Once, back in college, I participated in a hunger strike to end the Vietnam War. By not eating, I was supposedly enabling myself to focus my consciousness on peace. What actually happened was that I became absolutely obsessed with cheeseburgers, although if I really, really forced myself to concentrate on the tragedy in Southeast Asia, I could also visualize french fries. I kept this up for several days, but failed to have much of an impact on Washington. At no point, so far as I know, did a White House aide burst into the Oval Office and shout with alarm, "Some students at Haverford College have been refusing to eat for several days! followed by Lyndon Johnson saying, "Mah God! Ah got to change mah foreign policy!"
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 120-121
  • 1968- This is when it began to dawn on me that there was a serious competition going on in America to see who could be the biggest group of assholes: the right-wing assholes who thought that the Vietnam War was a good thing, as long as they personally did not have to go over to Vietnam and get shot at; or the left-wing assholes who thought that what we really needed was for more people to shoot each other here at home. It seemed as if both sets of assholes were winning in 1968. The King assassination did, in fact, result in terrible riots; and the Vietnam War, despite its growing unpopularity, became the longest in American history, with more U.S. troops over there than ever, and more men being drafted, and no end in sight.
  • The antiwar protests led to pro-war- or more accurately, anti-anti-war- protests, including a big one in Manhattan in which thousands of people, many of them construction workers, marched through the streets. I went out and watched that one during my lunch hour. My main memory is of two men, both about my age: One was a crew-cut protestor, wearing a tool belt; the other was a long-haired guy on the sidewalk. The long-haired guy started yelling "STOP THE WAR! STOP THE WAR!" The crew-cut guy ran over to him and, stopping just short of making physical contact, began yelling "BETTER DEAD THAN RED! BETTER DEAD THAN RED!" The two of them stood there, close enough to exchange spittle, screaming slogans at each other. That was political discourse in 1970.
  • 1973- This was the year that the war finally ended. Nixon called it "peace with honor," although he surely knew that the Communists would take over, just the same as if we had never gotten involved over there in the first place- except of course for the hundreds of thousands of people who got hurt or killed. So you tell me why the whole thing was not a terrible, criminal waste. You tell me why Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, instead of being required- along with all the other "leaders" who kept sending Americans over there long after they knew the war was pointless- to get down on his knees and beg the forgiveness of the American veterans, and their families, and the Vietnamese people. Everybody knew that "peace with honor" was bullshit, but nobody cared at that point. Everybody just wanted it to be over. When it finally was, there was no joy, only relief.
    • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 50 (1998), p. 151. NOTE: The Vietnam War did not end in 1973, but in 1975. 1973 was the year the United States officially withdrew from the conflict and removed the last of its combat personnel from South Vietnam.
  • A few years ago I got into a heated argument with the 18-year-old son of a friend of mine. Actually, it wasn't so much an argument as it was me getting angry at him for something he said. What he said, basically, was that he wished there was a war like Vietnam going on right then, so that the members of his generation would have something big, something exciting, in their lives. I told him that this was a reprehensible thing to say; I told him he should not want people to die to keep his generation amused. But in retrospect- although I obviously don't want another Vietnam- I see what he meant. He didn't want people to die; he wanted there to be something to give his life significance, something to mark his formative era that would be more meaningful than whatever TV sitcoms were popular at the time. We Boomers had that; we had a lot going on, maybe too much.
  • Said goodbye to his momma as he left South Dakota
    To fight for the red, white and blue
    He was nineteen and green with a new M-16
    Just doing what he had to do
    He was dropped in the jungle where the choppers would rumble
    With the smell of napalm in the air
    And the sergeant said "Look up ahead"
    • Big & Rich, "8th of November", Comin' To Your City (2006)
  • Like a dark evil cloud
    Twelve-hundred came down on him and twenty-nine more
    They fought for their lives but most of them died
    In the One-Seventy-Third Airborne
    • Big & Rich, "8th of November", Comin' To Your City (2006)
  • On the eighth of November the angels were crying
    As they carried his brothers away
    With the fire raining down and the hell all around
    There were few men left standing that day
    Saw the eagle fly through a clear blue sky
    1965, the eighth of November
    • Big & Rich, "8th of November", Comin' To Your City (2006)
  • We cannot remain silent on Viet Nam. We should remember that whatever victory there may be possible, it will have a racial stigma…. It will always be the case of a predominantly white power killing an Asian nation. We are interested in peace, not just for Christians but for the whole of humanity.
    • Eugene Carson Blake, remarks at a World Council of Churches meeting, Geneva, Switzerland (February 12, 1966); reported in The Sunday Star, Washington, D.C. (February 13, 1966), p. A–5.
  • The limits of the centralizing cybernetic model became clear in Vietnam, although its large role in the US defeat has often been disregarded. James Gibson has perhaps done the most to document the dramatic failure of ‘technowar’, ‘a production system that can be rationally managed and warfare as a kind of activity that can be scientifically determined by constructing computer models’. The principles of OR and SA were applied to provide analysis of the conflict and guidance to the policy makers while cybernetic command-and-control technologies were widely deployed. What developed in Vietnam can be appropriately described as an ‘information pathology’, an obsession with statistical evaluations and directing the war from the top, perceived as the point of omniscience, when in practice soldiers on the ground often understood far better than their superiors how badly the war was going.
  • Between 1967 and 1972, the Air Force ran Operation Igloo White at the cost of nearly $1 billion a year. Through an array of sensors designed to record sound, heat, vibrations, and even the smell of urine, feeding information to a control centre in Thailand which sent on the resulting targeting information to patrolling jet aircraft (even the release of bombs could be controlled remotely), this vast cybernetic mechanism was designed to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and trails providing logistical support to the North Vietnamese. At the time, extravagant claims were made about the performance of the system with the reported number of destroyed trucks in 1970 exceeding the total number of trucks believed to be in all of North Vietnam. In reality, far fewer truck remains were ever identified, there were probably many false positives in target identification, and the North Vietnamese and their Laotian allies became adept at fooling the sensors. In spite of all this, the official statistics still trumpeted a 90 per cent success rate in destroying equipment traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an assertion difficult to sustain given that the North Vietnamese conducted major tank and artillery operations in South Vietnam in 1972. Edwards incisively observes that ‘Operation Igloo White’s centralized, computerized,automated, power-at-a-distance method of “interdiction” resembled a microcosmic version of the whole US approach to Vietnam’.
  • Those of us who served in Vietnam are now 70 years old, give or take... we've all grown a bit gray-haired and fat over the years, and probably look like cuddly Grandpas and Grandmas now. Trust me, that wasn't how we looked back then. And unlike any previous American war, when we came "marching home," we were reviled, insulted, spat upon, had blood thrown on us in airports, or simply avoided and ignored. Those were not isolated incidents, and they left scares every bit as real and painful as an AK-47 or an RPG, the famous Russian- and Chinese-made Rocket-Propelled Grenade. When we got home, no one wanted to hear about the war, and we quickly learned not to bring it up. We were the embarrassing "800-pound gorilla" in the room that everyone wished would fade away; so that's what we did. For many vets we interviewed, I am the first person they've spoken to about the war since they came home, including their wives and children. Neither the American Legion nor the VFW wanted us around, much less as members. So, we formed our own veterans' groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Band of Brothers, and many others. They brought us together and have given us a new sense of pride, as you can see from the Vietnam Veteran baseball caps many now wear.
    • William F. Brown, Our Vietnam Wars: as told by 100 veterans who served (2018), p. 4
  • Over 9 million of us served on active duty during the war; 2,710,000, or about one third served in Vietnam; 211,454 were wounded, and 58,220 were killed. Unfortunately, that last number does not include the tens of thousands who have died because of the indiscriminate spraying of Agent Orange, or had their lives dramatically shortened because of the myriad of diseases it causes. They are part of a growing list of names that are NOT engraved on the wall in Washington. My estimate, which is by no means scientific, is that well over 50% of surviving Vietnam veterans now suffer from PTSD or one of the many Agent Orange-related illnesses such as Type II Diabetes, Neuropathy, Heart Disease, Parkinson's, Prostate Cancer, Hodgkin's Disease, and other types of cancers. Most of these diseases struck as we reached 60 years of age, like so many ticking bombs. As someone said, "Vietnam- it's the gift that keeps on giving. If they didn't kill us over there, they're determined to kill us over here."
    • William F. Brown, Our Vietnam Wars: as told by 100 veterans who served (2018), p. 4-5
  • The irony is that we who served were patriotic then and, if anything, we are even more patriotic now. Still, I don't believe there was a single vet I interviewed who doesn't think the war was a monstrous mistake and that we were sold down the river by a long series of US Presidents and Washington politicians, few of whom ever served, fewer still let their own children serve, and none ever studied the history of the people and country where they chose to send us to bleed and die, because they were afraid to admit a mistake.
    • William F. Brown, Our Vietnam Wars: as told by 100 veterans who served (2018), p. 5
  • And for the men in the audience, hands down, the worst PTSD in the war is in the women who served as surgical nurses in the Evac Hospitals and on the two hospital ships, doing 12-hour shifts 7 days a week, for 12 months. There were many heroes in that war, and the surgical nurses are among the most deserving of that title.
    Across the board, you will not find a more patriotic and loyal group of Americans than Vietnam Veterans. Some feel the war was lost from its inception, others feel the execution was terrible, while still others believe it would have ended differently if only Washington had taken the shackles off. Those fine touches aside, few would disagree with the comment "We were like a really good football team with a lousy set of coaches."
    • William F. Brown, Our Vietnam Wars, Volume 4: As Told By More Veterans Who Served (2020), hardcover, p. 7
  • You sense a strong sense of mission among the fighting men in Viet Nam, an enormous compassion for all victims of Communist atrocities, especially the children, and a religious conviction that surely must resemble the "faith of our fathers." On Christmas Eve, we traditionally closed our show with my leading the cast and troops in singing "Silent Night." Afterwards, I'd cry my eyes out. There in Viet Nam, in the muddy, battle-scarred camps where we played to jam-packed audiences, "Silent Night" became one of the most poignant and meaningful songs I ever delivered to any audience. I can close my eyes now and see some of those faces. Always, as I looked at them through a blur of tears, I wondered how many of them would never see another Christmas.
    • Anita Bryant, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory (1970). Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 100-101
  • The Road to Viet Nam, and to the other important places Mr. Hope visits at Christmas, had to end for Bob and me after the 1966 trip. That year Bobby and Gloria became old enough to understand that Daddy and Mommie were gone quite a few days. They cried for us a lot, Farmor and Farfar said, and really seemed to suffer from our absence. "Anita, I think it's time we decide to spend Christmas at home," Bob said gently. We were quiet for a bit, remembering this and that: Christmas Eve in a Saigon hotel room, where we spread our pictures out on the bed and reminisced about home... the U.S. Army major who had thanked us for coming to Viet nam at Christmas, saying, "I know how it is to leave your children, ma'am. I have five kids of my own"... the young sergeant we met in a mess hall in Cu Chi, who proudly showed us pictures of his firstborn son, whom he'd never seen... the years in the eyes of those rugged Green Beret guys as they joined me in singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah"... Billy Graham's Christmas message to the troops from the Book of John, Chapter 3, vers 16: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
    • Anita Bryant, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory (1970). Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 101
  • By Thanksgiving, 1967, we still had not made any really final decision about whether or not we'd return for another tour of Viet Nam. Bob and I thought back to the previous Thanksgiving, when I sang for troops at Ford Leonard Wood, Missouri, America's largest training post. Many of the men in that audience were in Viet Nam by now, I knew.
    • Anita Bryant, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory (1970). Old Tappan: Fleming H. Revell Company, p. 102
  • Intelligence on Vietcong positions and movements frequently arrived too late to be actionable, delayed in an information-processing infrastructure unable to treat all the data it was fed. And this despite the creation of an unprecedented telecommunications network in a field of operations, with electronic communications gear accounting for a third of all major items of equipment brought into the country and the first use of satellite communications for military purposes in 1965.
    As Arquilla and Ronfeldt recognize, ‘informational overload and bottlenecking has long been a vulnerability of centralized, hierarchical structures for command and control’

C

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To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. ~ Walter Cronkite
  • We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- kill. And get a big kill ratio in Vietnam. Get a big kill count. One thing at OCS was nobody said, "Now, there will be innocent civilians there." Oh sure, there will in Saigon. In the secure areas, the Vietnamese may be clapping the way the French in the '44 newsreels do, "Yay for America!" But we would be somewhere else: be in VC country. It was drummed into us, "Be sharp! Be on guard! As soon as you think these people won't kill you, ZAP! In combat you haven't friends! You have enemies!" Over and over at OCS we heard this, and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone's bad.
  • Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what's going on in this country. I maintain, as we have in SNCC, that the war in Vietnam is an illegal and immoral war. And the question is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of our country, are killing babies, women, and children? What can we do to stop that? And I maintain that we do not have the power in our hands to change that institution, to begin to recreate it, so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone, and that the only power we have is the power to say, "Hell no!" to the draft. We have to say -- We have to say to ourselves that there is a higher law than the law of a racist named McNamara. There is a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk. And there's a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. It's the law of each of us. It is the law of each of us saying that we will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will stand pat. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we're going to decide who we going to kill. And this country will only be able to stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, "Hell, no, we ain’t going."
  • The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction – all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to say such words, but candor permits no less.
    • Noam Chomsky, in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Introduction.
  • There were only two types of people when I came home- those who were against what we did and those who said nothing. I spent the next 17 years saying nothing. I had no one to talk to.
    • Jack Coughlin, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), by Bob Greene, p. 184
  • Because my hair was fairly short, I was easily picked out as a GI, even when I was in civilian clothes. The taunts hurt. I heard them on the West Coast and on the East Coast when I returned there. Couple this with running into a right-wing ideologue from my high school class at a bar one night, with him ranting about how he supports the war and why we should bomb the "gooks" into oblivion, but not listening to me relate that the farmers caught in the middle of the war, the ones who suffered the most, didn't have an interest in the ideological conflict. Hell, it was pretty complex. Pretty sad. No wonder I went into a shell for years.
    • Charles F. Corson, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 191
  • To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.
    • Walter Cronkite, CBS TV news anchor, on "Report from Vietnam," aired February 27, 1968.

D

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The 500,000 American soldiers in and near Saigon during the Vietnam war were matched in number by women and girls in prostitution, many in a kind of licensing system approved by the U.S. military. ~ Melissa Hope Ditmore
  • Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially, victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression, bear the brunt of this repression. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women, the overwhelming majority of them poor, fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more, including the most presumably respectable groups and individuals, are subject to police, FBI and military intelligence surveillance. The Nixon administration most recently responded to the massive protests against the war in Indochina by arresting more than 13,000 people and placing them in stadiums converted into detention centers. ... Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society.
  • I also have very strong feelings and opinions about the way that the U.S. military and the Vietnamese were sold out. The blame doesn't go alone to the press, or to the public, or to the government. Each contributed in large measure and each was influenced by the others. Regardless, the "chicken or egg" situation resulted in the loss of the war. But the real loss was far, far greater. This great nation lost face in the world, lost the respect of allies and adversaries, and most of all, we Americans lost our self-respect and our mutual respect. The strongest opinion I have is this, though. The U.S. may have lost the Vietnam War, but the U.S. military DID NOT lose it! We were not allowed to win it.
    • Standley H. Davis, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 256
  • When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff.
  • Tens of thousands of American servicemen enjoyed their first exotic port of call, too, this time at Olongapo City. The 20 or so R&R sites in the late 1950's had swelled to 1,567 in Olongapo and another 615 in Angeles city by the late 1980's.
    Hawaii and the Philippines were only two of the many places where military sexism found its logical expression. Soldiers viewed girls and women there through lenses of compliant Asian femininity but referred to them derogatorily as “slant eyes”. The “little brown sex machines” referred to T-shirts in Okinawa, Japan, morphed quickly into “little brown fucking machines powered by rice” in displays of militarized misogyny. Following six months of service, soldiers tired of drinking and playing billiards and video games could fly cheaply to Thailand, Hong Kong, Okinawa, or South Korea for more of the same, where structurally similar R&R venues had been set up for them. The 500,000 American soldiers in and near Saigon during the Vietnam war were matched in number by women and girls in prostitution, many in a kind of licensing system approved by the U.S. military.
  • While Kiem was imagining how he'd look in Vietnamese Navy dress whites, Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap was busy massing tens of thousands of troops around the French-held valley town of Dien Bien Phu, near the Laotian border. Giap's forces choked off the French supply lines, ringing their noose tighter and tighter as the French got thinner and weaker and monsoon rains beat down on their equipment. The French appealed to U.S. president Eisenhower and British prime minister Churchill for help, but it was not forthcoming. On 12 March 1954 Giap's army of fifty thousand men attacked French general Navarre's eleven or twelve thousand with everything in its arsenal. In early May, as Kiem was preparing to take the written exam for the French Naval Academy in Hanoi, Giap's men overran the last of the weakened French forces- and the Viet Minh won the war. Kime was thrilled that his country had finally gained its independence, but he couldn't help worrying that the French defeat might ruin his future plans. Mr. Sach said not to fear: no matter what happened at the postwar negotiating conference, the French would still want to help shape a young navy just starting out. They were human, and that was human nature.
    • Kiem Do and Julie Kane, Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War (1998), p. 63
  • Kiem knew he had seen the florid face somewhere before. Suddenly he remembered. As commandant of the Vietnamese Naval Academy, Kiem had once made the mistake of assigning three of his cadets to Lt. Comdr. Nguyen Van Luc, also of the River Force, for practical training. All three had come back sick and shaking, telling the same story under repeated questioning. Luc had ordered the cadets to change into their dress whites, handed them rifles, then ordered them to shoot at anything that moved- which they'd taken to be a figure of speech. But a few minutes later their patrol boat had rounded a bend in the river, exposing a small boy with a stick in his hand, tending a water buffalo. "Shoot," Luc had hissed. They had looked at one another in confusion, thinking it some sort of test. "Shoot!" Luc had screamed at them again, so loudly that even the boy at the river's edge had cocked his head and stared. Then Luc had raised his own gun and fired, killing both animal and child. Mercifully there weren't many officers like that in the navy- knowing nothing about the sea, only how to kill. Luc was more like an army than a navy man.
    • Kiem Do and Julie Kane, Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War (1998), p. 121
  • But before the ships could be brought into the harbor, their guns had to be dismantled, their ammo unloaded, their names painted over, their Vietnamese flags lowered, and the American colors raised. The shame of it was almost unbearable: Kiem and his men were a bunch of losers. They had lost the long war. In all of the excitement and chaos of the past week, it was the first time the realization had fully hit them. But there was still one small thing Kiem could do to help his men save face. He could ask for a proper changing-of-colors ceremony: something to soften the blow of seeing their flag yanked down like a rag. Late that afternoon, on board every ship, an ex-VNN officer made a speech; then a U.S. Navy officer made a speech. As the ropes creaked and the gold flag with three red stripes began to descend, the refugees broke into their national anthem: "Nay cong dan oi..." (Oh citizen of the country...) Their voices soared over the turqoise waters of the Pacific Ocean. Slowly the US flags were hoisted into place. Then the ex-VNN officers walked to the ship's rail, ripped the insignia from their uniforms, and tossed the gold glitter into the sea with their caps. They were civilians, now, not military men. Stripped of their national identities, they could help bring another country's warships into the bay with no shame.
    • Kiem Do and Julie Kane, Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War (1998), p. 216
  • I had gone in the service when I was seventeen years old. Got out at the age of twenty. I flew a lot between August 1968 and August of 1971. I probably showed the "hippies" more hostility than they aimed at me. Seventeen wasn't a good yezar for understanding. I was an eighteen-year-old corporal when I got stranded in San Francisco by a military flight. I was trying to get to the bus station, on foot, when the guy who passed for the hippie stereotype image picked me up. He drove me as far as I needed to go. Said he had a brother in Vietnam.
    • S. Duke, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 162

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With 450,000 U.S. troops now in Vietnam, it is time that Congress decided whether or not to declare a state of war exists with North Vietnam. Previous congressional resolutions of support provide only limited authority. Although Congress may decide that the previously approved resolution on Vietnam given President Johnson is sufficient, the issue of a declaration of war should at least be put before the Congress for decision. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
  • While my son was home on leave from Vietnam, a Presbyterian minister refused to shake his hand as we were leaving church. He said he could not and would not shake my son's hand because of the killing my son was involved in. Needless to say, my son doesn't venture to church very often even after all these years and different ministers.
    • May C. Eckhardt, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 228
  • I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail".
  • With 450,000 U.S. troops now in Vietnam, it is time that Congress decided whether or not to declare a state of war exists with North Vietnam. Previous congressional resolutions of support provide only limited authority. Although Congress may decide that the previously approved resolution on Vietnam given President Johnson is sufficient, the issue of a declaration of war should at least be put before the Congress for decision.
    • Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarks to Republican congressmen, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (July 15, 1967), published in a paraphrased form in The Washington Post (July 22, 1967), p. 1.

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  • I don't want these fucking medals, man! The Silver Star--the third highest medal in the country--it doesn't mean anything! Bob Smeal died for these medals; Lieutenant Panamaroff died so I got a medal; Sergeant Johns died so I got a medal; I got a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, Army Commendation medal, eight air medals, national defense, and the rest of this garbage--it doesn't mean a thing!
    • Ron Ferrizzi, former helicopter crew chief and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), before hurling his medals onto the Capitol steps during a VVAW protest on April 23, 1971. Quoted in The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns (2017), p. 481.
  • I figured if this medal is so important let's make it important. Here it is. You can have it back. End the war in Vietnam. What else is there? There was nothing else. I wouldn't put them on the wall for my son. That was the last thing in the world I would ever want my son to revere.
    • Ron Ferrizzi quoted in The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns (2017), p. 481-3, recalling his participation in the above protest over 40 years later.
  • This "cybernetic model" was adopted during the Vietnam War and endorsed by General William Westmoreland, leader of United States forces during the conflict. It influenced his vision for the near future of combat. In 1969 he predicted that within ten years the United States could experience an automated battlefield that thrived on information and consisted of "computer assisted intelligence evaluation," automated fire control and "24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types." Unfortunately, this technologically adept war fighting style was not to be as the debacle of Vietnam shook the scientific fundamentals that backed the cybernetic model of war. Confidence in statistical data returning from the front that indicated success on paper caused commanders to continue feeding the numbers back into the system and exacerbated the real problem. The cybernetic model masked the reality that the United States was losing the war to a less advanced, less trained and more poorly equipped Third World guerrilla force.
    "Defeat in Vietnam exposed the shortcomings of cybernetic warfare and revealed the inherent limitations of its attempt to make war into an entirely controllable and predictable activity.” Vietnam was a rude awakening that caused a shift from the cybernetic model to what international relations expert Antoine Bousquet refers to as "chaoplexity," a term combining the chaos and complexity of the modern battlefield. This model retains the technology dependence of the cybernetic model but discards the top-down "command and control" structure for a non-linear network. Computer scientist Christopher Langton supports this method saying "since it's effectively impossible to cover every conceivable situation, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they don't know how to handle.”
  • No doubt the funniest exploit I was involved in was dropping leaflets on the Bob Hope Christmas show at Cu Chi in 1969. Our company was assigned to provide perimeter security and air cover for the show, so none of our guys would get to see it. The night before, some enlisted men came to me with boxes of small white leaflets upon which they had written messages welcoming Bob Hope to Cu Chi. Three platoons had stayed up all night making these things, and they begged me to drop them on the show, since they knew I'd be up there. I told them it was closed airspace and you can't do that without getting into big trouble, but in a weak moment I let them talk me into it.
    Sure enough, in the middle of the show, I took a sharp turn, ignored the controller in my earphones, who wanted to know what I thought I was doing, and we dropped the leaflets. If you watch the videotape of that show, you can see Hope looking up as the leaflets came down. The next day, I was called in front of the CO, but he let me off when I explained why I had done it.
    In 1975, I was finishing my college degree at Saint Martin's in Olympia, Washington. Nobody could figure out who to get for a graduation speaker, so I suggested Bob Hope. Everyone said, "Great, you go get him." It took some time, working through his assistants, but I finally got him on the phone and explained that I was the guy who dropped the snow on his show at Cu Chi. "Why'd you do that?" he immediately asked. When I explained how I couldn't turn the troops down, he said, "Okay, I'll speak at your graduation." And he did. I was his escort the whole day, and he continued to pepper me with questions.
    • Joe Finch, Our Vietnam Wars: As Told By 100 Veterans Who Served (Self-published, 2018) by William F. Brown (editor and contributing author), p. 219
  • The Communist leaders in Moscow, Peking and Hanoi must fully understand that the United States considers the freedom of South Viet Nam vital to our interests. And they must know that we are not bluffing in our determination to defend those interests.
    • Gerald R. Ford, "U.S. Foreign Policy: New Myths and Old Realities", address to the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. (July 21, 1965); in Michael V. Doyle, ed., Gerald R. Ford, Selected Speeches (1973), p. 199.

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If the weather conditions were just right, some of these airplanes were equipped with a kind of movie projector that would shine big dragons or other frightful things onto low-hanging clouds. A downside of these tactics was that they could cause any friendly South Vietnamese troops in the neighborhood to run away also. ~ Winston Groom
 
The idea was that when one of the U.S. battalions engaged with the VC or North Vietnamese regulars, my team would be helicoptered to the site of the fighting and begin broadcasting surrender demands. In addition, one of the several English-speaking Vietnamese interpreters assigned to the brigade would be made available to us for conveying gentler messages. ~ Winston Groom
  • The presence of a Viet Nam veteran in uniform in his home town was often the occasion for glares and slurs. He was not told that he had fought well; nor was he reassured that he had done only what his country and fellow citizens had asked him to do. Instead of reassurance there was often condemnation- baby killer, murderer- until he too began to question what he had done and, ultimately, his sanity. The result was that at least 500,000- perhaps as many as 1,500,000- returning Viet Nam veterans suffered some degree of psychiatric debilitation, called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an illness which has become associated in the public mind with an entire generation of soldiers send to war in Vietnam.
    • Richard Gabriel, as quoted by Dave Grossman in On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), revised edition, p. 279
  • The authors of NSC-68 had assumed that there could be separate standards of conduct in these two spheres: that American leaders could learn "not to be good" in waging the Cold War while remaining "good" within the framework of their own domestic democratic society. It had been hard enough to maintain that separation during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: both presidents had been forced to admit that their "denials" in the U-2 and Bay of Pigs incidents had not been "plausible." With the Vietnam War, the line between what was allowed overseas and what was permitted at home disappeared altogether. The Johnson administration found it impossible to plan or prosecute the war without repeatedly concealing its intentions from the American people, and yet the decisions it made profoundly affected the American people. Far from measuring up to "its own best traditions" in fighting the Cold War, as Kennan had hoped it would, the United States in fighting the Vietnam War appeared to be sacrificing its own best traditions of constitutional and moral responsibility.
  • The most important departure from determinism during the Cold War had to do, obviously, with hot wars. Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape: Lenin even relied on them to provide the mechanism by which capitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers like the four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the three India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s.
  • You know, we get involved in these wars and we don't know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top and even down below. And, my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I, where you have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, with the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers.
    • Les Gelb interviewed on On the Media[1]
  • For years I had been hearing stories that when American troops returned home from Vietnam, they were spat upon by anti-war protestors. The stories were usually very specific. A soldier, fresh from Vietnam duty, wearing his uniform, gets off the plane at an American airport, where he is spat upon by "hippies." For some reason, in the stories it is always an airport where the spitting allegedly happened, and it is always "hippies" who allegedly did the spitting. In recent years, as we all know, there has been an undeniable shift in the public's attitude toward the men who fought in the Vietnam War. The symbols of this new attitude are many- the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is the most dramatic, but the box-office successes of such movies as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket are also testimony that, while the nation may still be divided over the politics of the war, the soldiers themselves are finally being welcomed home with warmth and gratitude. Yet even while the country has begun to tell the Vietnam veterans that they are loved and respected, the stories have continued to circulate; when those veterans returned from Vietnam, they were spat upon. Usually in airports. By hippies.
    • Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 9-10
  • I began to wonder about that. Even during the most fervent days of anti-war protest, it seemed that it was not the soldiers whom protestors were maligning. It was the leaders of government, and the top generals- at least that is how it seemed in memory. One of the most popular chants during the anti-war marches was, "Stop the war in Vietnam, bring the boys home." You heard that at every peace rally in America. "Bring the boys home." That was the message. Also, when one thought realistically about the image of what was supposed to have happened, it seemed questionable. So-called "hippies," no matter what else one may have felt about them, were not the most macho people in the world. Picture a member of the Green Berets, in full uniform, walking through an airport. Now think of a "hippie" crossing his path. Would the hippie have the nerve to spit on the soldier? And if the hippie did, would the soldier- fresh from facing enemy troops in the hungles of Vietnam- just stand there and take it? I raised the question in my syndicated newspaper column. Approximately 2.6 million Americans served in Vietnam. To our lasting sorrow, some 56,000 of them died. But more than 2 million Vietnam veterans came back alive. It is to those veterans that I posed the question: Were you spat upon when you returned from Vietnam?
    • Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 10
  • I did not ask the question lightly, or out of idle curiosity. It seemed to me that if the spitting-on-soldiers stories were true, we should know it. If they were myth, we should know that, too. I asked the potential respondents of the survey to provide approximate dates, places, and circumstances. The response was astonishing. From every section and corner of the country, well over a thousand people took the time to sit down, put their thoughts on paper, and tell me what happened when they returned to the U.S. from Vietnam. Virtually no one sent a letter with a simple confirmation or denial of being spat upon; the letters were long, sometimes rambling, invariably gripping essays on what it felt like to come back home after that war. It was as if by asking that specific, quirky question- "Were you spat upon when you returned?"- I had touched a button that would not have been touched had i asked a general question about the homecoming experience. To sum it up quickly... I have no doubt that many returning veterans truly were spat upon- literally- as a part of their welcome home. There were simply too many letters, going into too fine a detail, to deny the fact. I was profoundly moved by how, all these years later, so many men remembered exactly where and when they were spat upon, and how the pain has stayed with them. On the other hand, many veterans reported stories of kindness and compassion upon their return from Vietnam. Most of this group of veterans said they believe some of their fellow soldiers were spat upon- but said that they wanted the country to know that, in the late Sixties and the first half of the Seventies, there were American civilians eager to show their warmth to returning veterans, too. Other veterans said they were not spat upon, and were skeptical about the spitting stories. Many more, though, said that the question- if taken literally- was irrelevant. They said it didn't matter whether a civilian actually worked up sputum and propelled it toward them- they said that they were made to feel small and unwanted in so many other ways that it felt like being spat upon.
    • Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 10-12
  • Obviously the subject of this book will be of interest to people who served in Vietnam. But if that is all the book is, then it is a waste. This is an American story- a story of an amazing, troubling time in our history that may never be repeated again. In many ways, it is far more important for people who were never in Vietnam to read it than it is for the veterans to read it. The veterans already know the story.
    • Bob Greene, Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 16
  • We also had, at our disposal, an AC-47 “Gabby” aircraft—a twin-engine Douglas DC-3 in civilian life. We used it to circle above the enemy’s suspected hiding places and play scary funereal music over the loudspeakers to cause them to run away in terror or at least to keep their troops awake all night.
    If the weather conditions were just right, some of these airplanes were equipped with a kind of movie projector that would shine big dragons or other frightful things onto low-hanging clouds. A downside of these tactics was that they could cause any friendly South Vietnamese troops in the neighborhood to run away also.
  • The Vietnam veteran's belief in the justice of his cause and the necessity for his acts was constantly challenged and ultimately bankrupt when South Vietnam fell to an invasion from the North in 1975. A dim foreshadowing of this form of trauma can be seen in World War I, when the war ended without the unconditional surrender of the enemy, and many veterans bitterly understood that it wasn't really over, over there. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War it might legitimately be argued that we did not lose in Vietnam any more than we lost in the Battle of the Bulge: we got pushed back for a while, but ultimately we won the war. But today such a perspective is small consolation to the Vietnam vet. For the Vietnam veteran there is no walking Flanders Field, no reenactment of D Day, no commemoration of Inchon, or any other celebration by grateful nations whose peace and prosperity was preserved by American blood and sweat and tears. For too many years the Vietnam veterans knew only the defeat of a nation they fought and suffered for and the victory of a regime that many of them believed to be evil and malignant enough to risk dying to fight against.
    • Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), revised edition, p. 276
  • Ultimately, they may have been vindicated. The containment policy that they were an instrument of has been successful. Now the Russians themselves will concede the evils of communism. Hundreds of thousands of boat people attest to the disastrous nature of the North Vietnamese regime. Now the Cold War has ended in victory. And from one perspective we were no more defeated in Vietnam than U.S. forces were in the Philippines or at the Battle of the Bulge. They lost the battle but won the war. And the war was worth fighting. Perhaps we can see Vietnam from that perspective now, and I believe that there is truth and healing in that perspective. But for most Vietnam veterans this "victory" comes more than two decades too late.
    • Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), revised edition, p. 276
  • The greatest indignity heaped upon the soldier waited for him when he returned home. Often veterans were verbally abused and physically attacked or even spit upon. The phenomenon of returning soldiers being spit on deserves special attention here. Many Americans do not believe (or do not want to believe) that such events ever occurred. Bob Greene, a syndicated newspaper columnist, was one of those who believed these accounts were probably a myth. Greene issued a request in his column for anyone who had actually experienced such an event to write in and tell of it. He received more than a thousand letters in response, collected in his book, Homecoming.
    • Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), revised edition, p. 281
  • The Vietnam vet, the average vet who did no killing, is suffering an agony of guilt and torment created by society's condemnation. During and immediately after Vietnam our society judged and condemned millions of returning veterans as accessories to murder. At one level many, even most, of these horrified, confused veterans accepted society's media-driven, kangaroo-court conviction as justice and locked themselves in prisons of the worst kind, prisons in their mind. A prison whose name was PTSD.
    • Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (2009), revised edition, p. 292
  • When they started drafting for Vietnam in the late sixties, my son Gene was about twenty. He enlisted in the Army to go to the 101st Airborne like his pop. By that time the 101st Airborne had changed from paratroopers to an airmobile division. They were trained as paratroopers, too, but instead of being jumpers they were used to fly and rappel down from helicopters. I got my son billy exempt from duty. I knew what it was all about, and I wasn't about to send both sons. I told them Billy had to stay home and take care of me. I lied, but I'm glad I did it. That conflict was a mess, just like Iraq. Decisions are made with no common sense, and our kids go, they give their all, and they give their lives. Thank God Gene came back alive. He came home, and we never talked about it. You never talked about it in those days. He said, "How in the hell you done it, Pop, I'll never know." He got married and had six children. Billy had three children. Today I have twenty-two grandchildren and great-grandchildren. With Vietnam, I finally understood what my parents went through. My wife and I were worried every minute, and it was hard keeping Frannie calm. When you lose a kid, that stays with you forever.
    At that time, America was an entirely different country from what it was during WWII. When I went to war, we had good government, good leaders. They had common sense. Today, nobody has common sense. You mix politics and religion, you got trouble. America gets worse, not better. No common sense, no patriotism. Everybody was trying to get their kids out of going to Vietnam, trying everything. They sent them to live in Canada. They laughed at you because you sent your kids. An entirely different generation.
  • William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends: Two WWII Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story (2007) by William Guarnere and Edward Heffron with Robyn Post. New York: Berkley Caliber, p. 231-232

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We underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation. ~ David Halberstam
  • We underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation.
    • David Halberstam, as quoted in Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011) by Lewis Sorley, p. 96.
  • George, without doubt, the Army will be blamed for any failures in the Vietnam War.
    • General Paul D. Harkins made this remark to then-Major George S. Patton, IV, son of the famous World War II general, while Harkins was the first head of Military Assistance Command Vietnam in early 1963. As quoted in The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 120.
  • The struggle for Vietnam, a poor South-East Asian country the size of California, comprising mountains, jungles and paddies which enchant twenty-first-century tourists but were uncongenial to twentieth-century Western warriors, lasted three decades and cost between two and three million lives. In the eyes of the world, and even those of the communists’ Chinese and Soviet armourers, for the first twenty years it was a marginal affair. During its last phase, however, the war seized the imagination, roused the dismay and indeed revulsion of hundreds of millions of Western people, while destroying one US president and contributing to the downfall of a second. In the wave of youthful protest against authority which swept many countries in the 1960s, rejection of old sexual morality and an enthusiasm for the joys of marijuana and LSD became conflated with lunges against capitalism and imperialism, of which Vietnam appeared an exceptionally ugly manifestation. Moreover, many older Americans who lacked sympathy for any of those causes came to oppose the war because it was revealed as the fount of systematic deceits by their own government, and also seemed doomed to fail.
    • Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018) p. 1
  • Morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States.
    • Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” Armed Forces Journal issue, June 7, 1971
  • "Whatever, Jim." "Oh man, don't call me that." He looked at me. "Every time he gets pissed off he calls me that. Listen, motherfucker, I get outta the Marine Corps early. And I get home leave. The Old Man says I can go next month. "You can't be talkin' me. I jus' don' hear nonna that. I don' hear one word you sayin', Jim." "Aw..." "You jus' another dumb grunt. What I gotta talk to you for? It's like you never hear one word I say to you, ever. Not one word. An' I know... oh man, I jus' know you already signed that paper." Mayhew didn't say anything. It was hard to believe they were the same age. "What I gonna do with you, poor motherfucker? Why... why you jus' don' go runnin' out over th' wire there? Let 'em gun you down an' get it over with. Here, man, here's a grenade. Why you jus' don' go up backa the shithouse an' pull the pin an' lie down on it?" "You're fuckin' unbellievable. Man, it's just four months!" "Four months? Baby, four seconds in this whorehouse'll get you greased. An' your after your poppa an' all that. An' you jus' ain' learned. You're the sorriest, sorriest grunt motherfucker I ever seen. No, man, but the sorriest! Fuckin' Mayhew, man. I feel sorry for you." "Day Tripper? Hey, it'll be okay, you know?" "Sure, baby. Jus' don' talk to me right away. Clean your rifle. Write your momma. Do somethin'. Talk to me later." "We can smoke some bullshit." "Okay, baby. Say later." He walked into the bunker and lay down. Mayhew took off his helmet and scratched out something written on the side. It had read 20 April and OUTTA SIGHT!
  • A twenty-four-year-old Special Forces captain was telling me about it. "I went out and killed one VC and liberated a prisoner. Next day the major called me in and told me that I'd killed fourteen VC and liberated six prisoners. You want to see the medal?"
  • One day I went out with the ARVN on an operation in the rice paddies above Vinh Long, forty terrified Vietnamese troops and five Americans, all packed into three Hueys that dropped us up to our hips in paddy muck. We spread out and moved toward the marshy swale that led to the jungle. We were still twenty feet from the first cover, a low paddy wall, when we took fire from the treeline. It was probably the working half of a crossfire that had somehow gone wrong. It caught one of the ARVN in the head, and he dropped back into the water and disappeared. We made it to the wall with two casualties. There was no way of stopping their fire, no room to send a flanking party, so gunships were called and we crouched behind the wall and waited. There was a lot of fire coming from the trees, but we were all right as long as we kept down. And I was thinking, Oh man, this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, "Now c'mon baby, stop actin' so crazy," and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. "Might's well," he said. "We ain' goin' nowhere till them gunships come."
  • The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he'd have to wait for one of his own ships, they weren't coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well bring him down. So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions. The commander's code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals. "God damn it, Sergeant," he said through the static, "I thought you were a professional soldier." "I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, I was gonna lose my man." "This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?" "Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?" "At ease, Sergeant," Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken.
  • I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
  • The Vietnam War helped create a new category of unprotected speech: The “true threat.” In 1966, Robert Watts said to a crowd in Washington that “if they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.” Watts was promptly arrested for threatening the president. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction, saying that Watts’ speech was “crude political hyperbole,” not a “true threat.”
    Unfortunately, Watts v. United States did not explain what a true threat is; just what it isn’t. With threats and harassment everywhere on the internet and in “real life,” true threat doctrine seems primed for clarification in the near future. For now, we have only a vague idea of when threatening words leave the protective umbrella of the First Amendment.
  • What happens when “speech” isn’t really speech? In 1966, four protesters burned their draft cards to protest the Vietnam War, breaking a 1965 federal law. They appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in a major victory for “symbolic speech,” declared that the First Amendment protected non-verbal expression, too.
    The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. O’Brien was not a victory for the protesters, however. State legislatures could make laws that limit expression as long as they do not target any particular belief. The Court decided that the law did not target Vietnam protesters, and as a result, the protesters’ convictions were upheld.

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In Asia we face an ambitious and aggressive China, but we have the will and we have the strength to help our Asian friends resist that ambition. Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
  • The Vietnam war literally brought this country to its knees because, without going into the technicalities of what Congress might or might not have done to assert its authority, the fact is that on the record it was essentially a Presidential war—as was so viewed around the world. The United States was saved miraculously from disgrace and defeat because the people and the Congress, even though they thoroughly disapproved, still exercised the patience to see it liquidated without terribly undue damage. We still do not know what that damage was or may prove to be in history.
    • Jacob Javits, as quoted by Stathis, Stephen W. Landmark Debates in Congress: From the Declaration of Independence to the War in Iraq. Washington: CQ Press, 2009, pp. 405-14. Sage Knowledge, doi: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452240145.
  • A State Department working group similarly argued: "Unavoidably, the United States is, together with France, committed in Indochina"-even though a year earlier the Department had explicitly denied this (U.S. Department of Defense, 1971: 152-153)-and concluded, "The whole of Southeast Asia is in danger of falling under Communist domination" (FRUS, 1950, VI: 714). Until Korea these strong words were accompanied by only limited action. As in Europe, there was a great gap between the description of the threat and the proposed remedies. By 1954, of course, the United States seriously considered direct military intervention to prevent a Communist victory. While it is possible that this conflict could have become the vehicle for changing U.S. policy, two considerations make this unlikely. First, much of the American involvement followed and was at least partly caused by the Korean war. Once the United States became more anti-Chinese, defined the threat to its security more broadly, and had more funds available, it became both possible and necessary to try to halt the Viet-Minh. Before Korea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were in the forefront of those calling for a tougher policy against the Communists, opposed additional commitments. Although they welcomed the May 1950 decision to provide aid to Bao Dai, they were adamant that the United States not stretch its scarce military resources any thinner. Greater involvement in Indochina required greater funds, and in the climate of 1950 they were not likely to be forthcoming. Second, without extensive U.S. involvement, the fall of Indochina probably would not have produced the shock necessary to gain support for American rearmament. If China had sent troops in, the United States might have responded with force, as it did in Korea. However, since the Viet-Minh were capable of winning on their own, it is hard to imagine such a Chinese move.
  • In Asia we face an ambitious and aggressive China, but we have the will and we have the strength to help our Asian friends resist that ambition. Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
    • Lyndon B. Johnson, remarks at Akron University, Akron, Ohio (October 21, 1964); in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963–64, book 2, p. 1390–91.
  • As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion. Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this Nation during the Korean war, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, or when our men were slugging it our in Europe or when most of our Air Force was shot down that day in June 1942 off Australia.

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I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists. ~ John F. Kennedy
 
It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • Was I spit on at the airport? No. Was I able to find a job when a prospective employer found out I was a Nam vet? No. Was I able to get a date with a girl if she knew I was a Nam vet? No. Was I even welcome at the local American Legion post as a Nam vet? No. Were my parents able to tell people without accusations that their son had just returned from three years in Vietnam? No. I returned in September 1969 and was in Atlanta, Georgia. I denied being a vet until recently because I was repeatedly told that Nam vets had flashbacks and could freak out on the job. I was repeatedly asked how I could live with myself after killing all those innocent people. I could have dealt with being spit on by a hippie. I probably would have broken him in two. Being twenty-one and not being able to get a job, a date, a place to live, or a drink with other vets was the hard part. I still remember.
    • Danny Kelly, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 240
  • I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists.
    • John F. Kennedy, televised interview with Walter Cronkite (September 2, 1963); in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 652.
  • I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of -- of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t know it yet but it’s created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. As a veteran, and one who feels this anger, I’d like to talk about it. We’re angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the Administration of this country.
  • In 1970 at West Point, Vice President Agnew said: "Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms which those misfits abuse." And this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, his boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion; and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It’s a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the best men of this country; because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to; because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam; because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America’s best men when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called to do in Southeast Asia.
  • In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it’s that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We are probably much more angry than that and I don’t want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I’m outclassed here. I know that all of you have talked about every possible -- every possible alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you’ve considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I’m not going to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling which many of the men who’ve returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found that most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace; and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.
  • We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of "free-fire zones," "shoot anything that moves," and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater. And so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said "That hill has to be taken." And after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for the reoccupation of the North Vietnamese; because -- because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas; because we couldn’t lose, and we couldn’t retreat, and because it didn’t matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's, and so many others. And now we’re told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
  • The war the soldiers tried to stop.
    • John Kerry, commenting on how Vietnam would be known to future generations, at rally of antiwar demonstrators, west front of the Capitol (April 24, 1971), as reported by The Evening Star, Washington, D.C. (April 26, 1971), p. A–7.
  • As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.
Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. 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 deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be — are — are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [...] I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy" [...] Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak of the — for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.
  • All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long.
  • For my constituents on the East Side of Manhattan, perhaps my most important fight was against the war in Vietnam. I put together one of the first joint resolutions endorsed bot by representatives who supported and who opposed the war, calling for peace. A number of Congressmen simply could not abandon their initial support for our military involvement, even if they had since shifted their positions; they found it hard to publicly admit error. It was a dilemma for them. The resolution succeeded in creating a climate in which some members who realized hey had erred could change their positions with dignity, now that the war appeared unwinnable.
    My first run-in over the war was with Congressman Wayne Hays, a really mean-spirited bully from Ohio. He was very smart, and one of the great House debaters. At the time, he was the powerful Chairman of the House Administration Committee. During the week of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh's death, I went to the floor and said that, to the Vietnamese, he was like George Washington is to us, the father of his country, and I suggested we use the occasion of his death to extend the hand of friendship. Wayne Hays, in response on the House floor, referred to me as "an emissary from Hanoi."
    I did not appreciate the charge, so I took Hays's comments from the Congressional Record, placed them alongside my own, and sent them out in a newsletter to my constituents. "Who do you agree with?" I wrote. "Please write to Wayne Hays and tell him what you think."
    A week or so later, Hays approached me on the floor. "What the hell is goin' on?" he said. "I'm gettin' all these damn letters denouncing me. Stop it!" And then he laughed. I don't think he really cared that he was being deluged with letters form a bunch of liberal New Yorkers. He was amused by the whole thing. I took the exchange with Hays as a kind of signal that I was finally accepted, even by those who thought I was a liberal flake from New York City.
    • Ed Koch, Citizen Koch: An Autobiography (1992), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 110-111
  • With time, my opposition to the war grew to where I introduced legislation to give amnesty to the thousands of draft dodgers and deserters in exile in Canada. People really thought I was nuts, including some of my liberal Congressional friends who opposed the war. I knew there was no hope of its passing, not at that time, but I wanted to start the discussion. (As it turned out, I wasn't nuts at all, just ahead of the times; amnesty was finally granted under President Jimmy Carter.)
    • Ed Koch, Citizen Koch: An Autobiography (1992), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 111
  • I remember walking down Eighth Street one Friday morning, and being stopped by one of my constituents, an elderly lady who approached me, wanting to talk. "How'm I doing?" I said, in what was becoming the signature greeting of my political career. "Congressman," she said, "you're doing just terrible. How could you support those yellow-bellies? My grandson is in Vietnam, and here you are supporting those yellow-bellies in Canada." "Ma'am," I said, as gently as I could manage. "I don't want to try and persuade you, but let me tell you my position. I think the war is wrong. I think that ultimately we have to bring our boys home. We've ruined too many lives, the draft dodgers' and the deserters' among them. It is time to heal. Now, I understand you see things differently, and I hope your grandson is okay, but this is my position. I hope you'll ultimately agree with me, but it's not necessary that you do. We will never agree on everything." Then I added, "But other than that, how else am I doing?" "Other than that, you're doing wonderful," she said, and we both laughed.
    • Ed Koch, Citizen Koch: An Autobiography (1992), New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 111
  • The American war in Vietnam was not unique and certainly no more reprehensible than numerous other wars, including the earlier French war in Vietnam. But this time it was being pursued by a nation with unprecedented global power. At a time when colonies were struggling to re-create themselves as nations, when the “anticolonial struggle” had touched the idealism of people all over the world, here was a weak and fragile land struggling for independence while this new type of entity known as a “superpower” dropped more non-nuclear bombs on its small territory than had been dropped on all of Asia and Europe in World War II. At the height of 1968 fighting, the U.S. military was killing every week the same number of people or more as died in the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack. While within the movements in the United States, France, Germany, and Mexico there was tremendous splintering and factionalism, everyone could agree—because of the power and prestige of the United States and the brutal and clearly unfair nature of the American war in Vietnam—that they opposed the Vietnam War. When the American civil rights movement became split in 1968 between the advocates of nonviolence and the advocates of Black Power, the two sides could come together in agreement on opposition to the Vietnam War. Dissident movements around the world could be built up simply by coming out against the war. When they wanted to protest, they knew how to do it; they knew about marches and sit-ins because of the American civil rights movement. They had seen it all on television from Mississippi, and they were eager to be freedom marchers themselves.

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Unlike Greece, fifteen years earlier, which had been able to seal its borders with the help of neighbors, South Vietnam could not count on such aid. Cambodia's port of Sihanoukville made possible the flooding of the South Vietnam battlefield with a family of Sino-Soviet equipment that was completely compatible with that used by VC/NVA forces in the rest of Vietnam. The overthrow of Sihanouk and the closing of the Sihanoukville port in early 1970 were too little too late. Laos was still a wide-open corridor, and U.S. forces were withdrawing. It was never a question of victory for the North, it was only a matter of time. ~ Lanning and Cragg
  • Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has.
  • In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Donald Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld.
  • The continuity in the infiltration corridor through Cambodia and Laos mitigated against the forces being stopped. Unlike Greece, fifteen years earlier, which had been able to seal its borders with the help of neighbors, South Vietnam could not count on such aid. Cambodia's port of Sihanoukville made possible the flooding of the South Vietnam battlefield with a family of Sino-Soviet equipment that was completely compatible with that used by VC/NVA forces in the rest of Vietnam. The overthrow of Sihanouk and the closing of the Sihanoukville port in early 1970 were too little too late. Laos was still a wide-open corridor, and U.S. forces were withdrawing. It was never a question of victory for the North, it was only a matter of time.
    • Lanning and Cragg, Inside the VC and the NVA, pp. 34–159
  • All we are saying is give peace a chance.
    • John Lennon, song "Give Peace a Chance" (1969); common chant in rallies against the Vietnam War.
  • U.S. imperialism is trying hard to find a way out by launching a world war. We must take this seriously. The focal point of the present struggle lies in Vietnam. We have made every preparation. Not flinching from maximum national sacrifices, we are determined to give firm support to '-the fraternal Vietnamese people in carrying the war of resistance against U.S. aggression and for national salvation through, to the end.
    • Lin Biao, minister of defense, People's Republic of China; as quoted in Daily Report, Foreign Radio Broadcasts, Issues 191-195, Central Intelligence Agency (October 3, 1966)
  • One problem that continues to haunt me had to do with my friend Tom. We became great friends in Officer Basic and Ranger School, as did our wives and kids. He was white, I'm African-American, and we were called "Salt and Pepper." He went to Vietnam before I did, and was badly wounded, paralyzed from the chest down, and wasn't going to get any better. His wife finally called me for help, because he shut her out and wanted a divorce. I went there and talked to him, but I couldn't change his mind. He had grown bitter, and was determined not to ruin his wife's life or his kids'. Finally, he left the house, moved in with a brother, and disappeared. It was a real tragedy, and showed me that not all Vietnam casualties have their names on the wall.
    • Harry Lumpkin, as quoted in Our Vietnam Wars: As Told By 100 Veterans Who Served (2018) by William F. Brown, p. 311

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Where is your data? Give me something I can put in the computer. Don’t give me your poetry. ~ Robert McNamara
 
But we had validated both the principle and the practice of airmobile warfare. A million American soldiers would ride to battle in Huey helicopters in the next eight years, and the familiar "whup, whup, whup" of their rotors would be the enduring soundtrack if this war. Finally- even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that had never before lost a war- some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words: "No one starts a war- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it." ~ Harold G. "Hal" Moore
  • “There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’”
    This is, first and foremost, a joke. But given the emphasis that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara placed on data and running the number—I began to wonder if there was actually some software that tried to calculate precisely when the United States would win the war. And if it was possible that it once gave such an answer.
    The most prominent citation for the apocryphal story comes in Harry G. Summers’ study of the war, American Strategy in Vietnam: A Critical Analysis. In this telling, however, it is not the Johnson administration doing the calculation but the incoming Nixon officials:
    When the Nixon Administration took over in 1969 all the data on North Vietnam and on the United States was fed into a Pentagon computer—population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, number of tanks, ships, and aircraft, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked, “When will we win?” It took only a moment to give the answer: “You won in 1964!”
    He said “the bitter little story” circulated “during the closing days of the Vietnam War.” It made the point that there “was more to war, even limited war, than those things that could be measured, quantified, and computerized.”
    There’s no doubt that Vietnam was quantified in new ways. McNamara had brought what a historian called “computer-based quantitative business-analysis techniques” that “offered new and ingenious procedures for the collection, manipulation, and analysis of military data.”
    In practice, this meant creating vast amounts of data, which had to be sent to computing centers and entered on punch cards. One massive program was the Hamlet Evaluation System, which sought to quantify how the American program of “pacification” was proceeding by surveying 12,000 villages in the Vietnamese countryside. “Every month, the HES produced approximately 90,000 pages of data and reports,” a RAND report found. “This means that over the course of just four of the years in which the system was fully functional, it produced more than 4.3 million pages of information.”
  • When I got out it took a few months for my hair to grow out so I could pass for normal. I couldn't get a regular date if the girl knew I was in the war. If you mentioned Nam they had to go or they changed the subject. None would acknowledge your pain or your experience. You just kept it inside. It wasn't wise to put down that you had been in Nam when you filled out a job application, because they'd think you would bring your problems to work- if you showed up at all. I sat on all of these feelings for 19 years, and now it is good to get it off my chest. We grew up on John Wayne movies. We were ripe for the picking when the war came. They told us that if we didn't stop the Commies in Nam, we would "see the Commies come marching down our streets." So we ended up saps for LBJ. The people who turned their backs on us might not be able to find a soldier when they need one next time. Almost every male in my family has been in the military, but it ended with me. They'll have to kill me to get at my son.
    • Sam Maggio, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 244-245
  • When I entered West Point, some Americans still believed the Vietnam War might end honorably. By the time I graduated, South Vietnam did not exist. As cadets, we watched the war teeter and implode, and the historical sweep was not lost on us.
  • It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.
    • Attributed to an unnamed United States major, referring to the bombing of Ben Tre, South Vietnam; reported by AP correspondent Peter Arnett, "Major Describes Move", The New York Times (February 8, 1968).[2]
    • Often misquoted in a variety of ways, notably: In order to save the village, we had to destroy it. or "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."
      • John McGuffin, Internment (1973), Anvil Books, page 26 (early misquote); Ralph Keyes, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (2006), ISBN 978-0-312-34004-9.
  • Where is your data? Give me something I can put in the computer. Don’t give me your poetry.
  • Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war.
  • My brother did two tours in Vietnam. During that time I remember him coming home twice. The first visit home was in his uniform, looking and feeling mighty proud to be doing a good deed for our country. The second time he came home to stay. When I saw him, he was in civilian clothes- I remember a striped T-shirt and beige corduroy pants and brown boots. I guess sometime later I must have asked him why he didn't wear his Air Force uniform home. I distinctly remember him saying that if he had worn it, he would have been spat on by the people at the airport who were against the war and who didn't understand that he was over there fighting for them. He said that the people were his own age- people he went to school with. I must have been all of twelve years old at the time, but I will never forget the emptiness and sadness in my big brother's eyes. He was my hero.
    • Megan Meadows, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 254
  • By the summer of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, the Cold War modus vivendi had largely been shredded. Reporters felt that they were being used to publish the White House’s lies about the progress of the war in Vietnam, and they struck back. Even before the Convention began, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and NBC had run stories saying that the war was unwinnable, in contradiction to what the Johnson Administration was telling the public. So when the Convention was being planned—Lyndon Johnson did not attend, having withdrawn from the race in March, but he was very much in charge—pains were taken to incommode the news media as much as possible.
  • By the end of 1970, people had almost forgotten about Vietnam (although Americans continued to die there for five more years), partly because they were seeing and reading much less about it. The networks understood that most viewers did not want to see images of wounded soldiers or antiwar protesters or inner-city rioters. They also understood that the government held, as it always had, the regulatory hammer.
  • Vietnam was the beginning of our present condition of polarization, and one of the features of polarization is that there is no such thing as objectivity or impartiality anymore. In a polarized polity, either you’re with us or you’re against us. You can’t be disinterested, because everyone knows that disinterestedness is a façade. Viewers in 1968 didn’t want fair and balanced. They wanted the press to condemn kids with long hair giving cops the finger.
  • When I went back to college at Southern Illinois University in 1971 I was- or at least I felt like- the only hawk on campus. One day I ran into a "friend" I had known there before I went into the service. He seemed genuinely glad to see me and asked whet I'd been doing. I told him I had been in the Marines and in Vietnam. He looked at me like I was dirt and said, "What a sucker." Maybe I was a sucker, but not a coward.
    • Allen D. Mohr, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 192-193
  • I do not for a moment regret the 22 years I served my country. I feel a sadness and frustration for the millions of people we abandoned in Vietnam. No, most of us were not spat upon when we came home, but it hurts to remember those who died to help hopeless people on behalf of a nation that- in the last analysis, by its withdrawal- proved it didn't give a damn.
    • John M. Moltz, Jr., as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 210
  • What, then, had we learned with our sacrifices in the Ia Drang Valley? We had learned something about fighting the North Vietnamese regulars- and something important about ourselves. We could stand against the finest light infantry troops in the world and hold our ground. General Westmoreland thought he had found the answer to the question of how to win this war: He would trade one American life for ten or twelve North Vietnamese lives, day after day, until Ho Chi Minh cried uncle. Westmoreland would learn, too late, that he was wrong; that the American people didn't see a kill ratio of 10-1 or even 20-1 as any kind of bargain.
    • Lieutenant General Harold G. "Hal" Moore, co-author of We Were Soldiers Once.. And Young (1992), p. 345
  • But we had validated both the principle and the practice of airmobile warfare. A million American soldiers would ride to battle in Huey helicopters in the next eight years, and the familiar "whup, whup, whup" of their rotors would be the enduring soundtrack if this war. Finally- even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that had never before lost a war- some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words: "No one starts a war- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it."
    • Lieutenant General Harold G. "Hal" Moore, co-author of We Were Soldiers Once.. And Young (1992), p. 345
  • We'd originally intended to put our medals in a body bag and have them delivered to Congress. But the Nixon administration erected this big wire and wood fence on the steps of our Capitol to keep us out--keep out the young men and women who were fighting that war. And all that did was piss us off and give us the greatest photo opportunity that we could ever have had.
    • John Musgrave, Marine veteran and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), on the April 1971 protest in which veterans hurled their medals onto the Capitol steps. Quoted in The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns (2017), p. 481.
  • Since the Vietnamese continued to resist the US-imposed dictatorship in South Vietnam, the United States invaded Vietnam in the early 1960s, beginning a devastating campaign of bombings, atrocities, chemical warfare, and torture, leading to the deaths of 3.8 million people, according to a study published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).
    According to Nick Turse in Kill Anything That Moves:
    [T]he stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some “bad apples,” however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. … [T]hey were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.
    Turse’s investigations of US war crimes (spurred by his discovery of the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Crimes Working Group) lend credence to the various displays and photographs one will find in the museum.
    One example is a sewer pipe present at the Thanh Phong massacre, used by three children to hide in before being killed by future Senator Bob Kerrey and his cohorts (ten other civilians also died).

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  • My husband is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War, serving there in 1968. He is not writing this because he says it doesn't matter, and besides he wasn't spat on by hippies in the airport, so why hear from him? Maybe he's right. But there is more than one way to be spat on, and by the attitude and behavior of the American people, my husband was spat on over and over again. He did show up at an airport in full uniform. Just his dad met him there, his mother and sister didn't bother to come along. Then his dad tells him he should never have gone. Questions like, "Were you part of those who burned, raped, and pillaged for our government?" There is a healing in America of the psychological wounds of Vietnam, and that's fine. The tangible evidence of this healing makes most people feel good. But patriotism today is a fad, costing nothing. It's easy to be patriotic, and desirable. Patriotism in 1968 cost arms, legs, eyes, and life. Patriotism in 1968 cost acceptance by the nation. My husband says the inner healing of the combat veteran started a long time ago, by necessity. Those who could, adjusted to their undesirable status in America; those who couldn't, killed themselves, have gone crazy, or escape through drugs and/or alcohol. My husband feels the combat veteran, the one who was right there on the front, fighting and sweating it out, for the most part still feels the betrayal of the American people. We weren't there when they needed us.
    • Joyce E. Nicodin, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 247-248
  • But also out here in this dreary, difficult war, I think history will record that this may have been one of America's finest hours, because we took a difficult task and we succeeded.
    • Richard Nixon, remarks to American troops of the First Infantry Division, Di An, Vietnam (July 30, 1969); in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969, p. 588.
  • Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.
    • Richard Nixon, Appeal to the nation (3 November 1969) for support in the Vietnam War, as reported in Chambers Dictionary of Quotations (1997), p. 730.

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  • The idea of hippies spitting on "a burly member of the Green Berets" fresh from a tour of duty fighting the North Vietnamese in the bush isn't an accurate description. Just as everybody who opposed the war wasn't a hippie, the typical guy coming back from Nam wasn't a Green Beanie. Most weren't even grunts in the bush. They were rear echelon mother fuckers- ammo humpers, or finance clerks, medics. Maybe they worked in supply or were M.P.s. Not much in their Nam experience would condition them to do anything but "stand there and take it," because for a full year, that's just what they did. They stood there and took it- from colonels, captains, sergeants- even if they never raised an M16 against a VC. For a lot of guys, the enemy had been the Army, not the Nam, and being hassled at the airport in uniform, while unwelcome, was often the last act of harassment in their military careers.
    • Jerry Olson, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989) by Bob Greene, p. 201-202

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The Vietnamese claim that 4 million people were exposed to Agent Orange and 3 million of its people suffer from medical conditions that were caused by the exposure from the Vietnam War. Despite the efforts to decontaminate the soil, the U.S. vehemently denies that the number of Agent Orange illnesses are that high, which according to the Vietnamese includes children of men and women who were exposed to the dioxin following the war. ~ Beatrice Peterson
 
...military supplies were sailed directly from North Vietnam on communist-flagged (especially of the Eastern bloc) ships to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, where that nation's neutrality guaranteed their delivery. The supplies were unloaded and then transferred to trucks which transported them to the frontier zones that served as PAVN/NLF Base Areas. These Base Areas also served as sanctuaries for PAVN/NLF troops, who simply crossed the border from South Vietnam, rested, reinforced, and refitted for their next campaign in safety. ~ John Prados
 
In 1964 [the People's Army of Vietnam] began to send to the battlefield complete units at their full authorized strength of personnel and equipment... By the end of 1965 our main force army in South Vietnam totaled almost 92,000... Our main force troops grew from 195,000 soldiers in early 1965 to 350,000 soldiers in May 1965 and finally to 400,000 by the end of 1965.. During 1966 the strength of our full-time forces in South Vietnam would be increased to between 270,000 and 300,000 soldiers... By the end of 1966 the total strength of our armed forces was 690,000 soldiers. ~ Merle Pribbenow
  • I still think a lot about Vietnam. I was there in ’69, in Hanoi, and also I traveled through all of the North from the DMZ, and so I saw an awful lot of it and I felt the people very much. I was at that time very involved in dealing with American POWs. I don’t think in my life I’ll ever get over those concerns and the injustice of the United States not simply acting out its responsibilities to Vietnam. Those things are not over for me. And the question of amnesty . . . they’re related.
  • I have often reflected that General Abrams, who had worked so hard to make the South Vietnamese armed forces capable of defending their country, at least had been spared the agony of seeing the death of the Republic of Vietnam. Westmoreland, on the other hand, was not spared that trauma, but seems over the years since the war to have become a national scapegoat, blamed for everything that went wrong in Vietnam, large or small, regardless of whether he had even a remote connection with the matter. It is a singularly fair and unsupported judgement. Many scores of senior American officials, civilian and military, including the author, contributed to our Vietnam mistakes, most of which have been so judged in hindsight. The real "blame", of course, must be laid squarely on the Hanoi regime and the North Vietnamese people, who demonstrated to the world that they had the will to prevail. Although it is a small comfort to Westmoreland, history is replete with the examples of one native son's being singled out, rightly or wrongly, as the person responsible for a national disaster.
    • General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam (1984), p. 133-144
  • From 1971 to 1974, I was a student at the New York University School of Law. As far as I know, I was the only Vietnam vet in my class and perhaps at the law school. I was generally thought of as an exotic species. Some people were curious, some were repelled. Some refused to have anything to do with me. It was not all bad, of course, and I really think that some women went to bed with me just for the experience of having such a strange and weird person. When Nixon and Kissinger conducted the criminal Christmas bombing campaign and the campuses became unruly, I chose not to boycott class because while I disagreed violently with the bombing, I knew Nixon did not give a damn about the boycotts, and when I crossed the picket line I was singled out for abuse.
    • Frederic R. Pamp, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 225
  • I made a decision in 1968, when I enlisted in the Army two weeks before I was to be drafted: Having accepted the benefits this country has to offer, I had a duty to serve, the country had a right to tell me to go in the Army, and the Army had the right to order me to Vietnam. I did and still do think that the war was an awful mistake, that we had no business there, and that we were ruining both their country and ours. And I did and still do feel that I was given unfair, unreasonable treatment both by some of those who were against the war and some of those who supported it. My point is that some people did not make a distinction between a bad policy and the individuals who have to carry it out.
    • Frederic R. Pamp, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 225-226
I: The nine classic principles of war as explained and demonstrated by Clausewitz definitely apply in this type of conflict. One principle should be added and that would be the principal of cultural understanding or familiarization.
II: Operations should be guided by good intelligence "now," as opposed to refined intelligence, for example, two hours from now.
III: Fully understand the form of warfare in a Vietnam type of conflict- call it counterinsurgency or whatever term is being used to characterize the so-called meeting engagement. Go within the training base and develop doctrine at all levels which supports this form of combat.
IV: When contact with an enemy unit is either present or expected, the commander must always hold a unit close in hand and in reserve to commit upon hostile contact. This reinforcement capability is absolutely critical in guerrilla warfare.
V: A commander may talk all day and most of the night on the subject of preventative maintenance in the field. However, it is simply not well done on the battlefield as there are far too many distractions, interruptions and poor facilities. As a result of my experience, I believe the best procedure is periodic withdrawal of armored units to a safe rear area where higher echelon maintenance personnel can provide valid assistance. Although those who would oppose that procedure would oppose it all the way, I found that armored vehicle capability, especially tanks, increased in the long term.
  • Major General George S. Patton, IV, stating his "Five Principles for Counterinsurgency Warfare", developed after thirty-three months total spent in Vietnam. As quoted in The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 159
  • The trouble is that the goal was never clear. It changed under the Johnson administration from time to time. Our overall goal was pacification, but it didn't work because of lack of strategic direction from the United States. I want to make sure you understand this. The national leadership, the President, did not bring the country into the total scene of the war. There was a lack of unification of the American people. A manifestation of that lack was the failure to mobilize the National Guard and Reserves. In my opinion, one of the great criticisms that will be placed against the leadership will be that failure to mobilize. The point is, when you mobilize the Guard and Reserves, you also act toward mobilizing the people, because some guy gets called out of a drug store and called to active duty, so the burden is not just placed on the career services, who were stretched to the breaking point.
    Do you see what I'm getting at? You can do all kinds of things to this testimony and make me look like a goddamn nut. But I'm talking about strategic direction plus violation of the fundamental principles of war- of which there are nine. We could have won by more correct adherence to those principles, such as the principle of objective, the principle of unity of command, the principle of surprise and security, all of which were violated. The United States can never afford again to allow itself to be at such a vast strategic disadvantage as we were in Vietnam. I sincerely hope we've learned. We were defeated by an eighth-rate power.
    • Major General George S. Patton, IV, as quoted in The Bad War: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Kim Willenson (1987), p. 78-79
  • Though it isn't really war
    we're sending fifty thousand more
    to help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese
  • The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted.
    • Ralph Peters, Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (2002), p. 287
  • The Vietnamese claim that 4 million people were exposed to Agent Orange and 3 million of its people suffer from medical conditions that were caused by the exposure from the Vietnam War. Despite the efforts to decontaminate the soil, the U.S. vehemently denies that the number of Agent Orange illnesses are that high, which according to the Vietnamese includes children of men and women who were exposed to the dioxin following the war.
  • ...military supplies were sailed directly from North Vietnam on communist-flagged (especially of the Eastern bloc) ships to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, where that nation's neutrality guaranteed their delivery. The supplies were unloaded and then transferred to trucks which transported them to the frontier zones that served as PAVN/NLF Base Areas.[8] These Base Areas also served as sanctuaries for PAVN/NLF troops, who simply crossed the border from South Vietnam, rested, reinforced, and refitted for their next campaign in safety.
    • John Prados, The Blood Road, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998, pp. 47–178
  • Twenty-two years of mental tears
    Cries a suicidal Vietnam vet
    Who fought a losing war on a foreign shore
    To find his country didn't want him back
    Their bullets took his best friend in Saigon
    Our lawyers took his wife and kids,
    No regrets
    In a time I don't remember
    In a war he can't forget
    He cried forgive me for
    What I've done there
    'Cause I never meant the things I did"
    And give me something to believe in
    If there's a Lord above
    And give me something to believe in
    • Poison, "Something to Believe In" (1990)
  • In 1964 our army began to send to the battlefield complete units at their full authorized strength of personnel and equipment... By the end of 1965 our main force army in South Vietnam totaled almost 92,000... Our main force troops grew from 195,000 soldiers in early 1965 to 350,000 soldiers in May 1965 and finally to 400,000 by the end of 1965.. During 1966 the strength of our full-time forces in South Vietnam would be increased to between 270,000 and 300,000 soldiers... By the end of 1966 the total strength of our armed forces was 690,000 soldiers.
    • Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975. Trans. by Merle Pribbenow, Lawerence KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002, p. 78-211

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And Townsville lined the footpaths as we marched down to the quay
This clipping from the paper shows us young and strong and clean
And there's me in me slouch hat with me SLR and greens
God help me - I was only nineteen. ~ Redgum
 
A four-week operation when each step can mean your last one on two legs
It was a war within yourself
But you wouldn't let your mates down 'til they had you dusted off
So you closed your eyes and thought about somethin' else. ~ Redgum
 
We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said that if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. ~ Ronald Reagan
 
Perhaps at this late date we can all agree that we've learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win. ~ Ronald Reagan
  • And Townsville lined the footpaths as we marched down to the quay
    This clipping from the paper shows us young and strong and clean
    And there's me in me slouch hat with me SLR and greens
    God help me - I was only nineteen.
    • Redgum, "I Was Only 19", Caught in the Act (1983), verse 1
  • A four-week operation when each step can mean your last one on two legs
    It was a war within yourself
    But you wouldn't let your mates down 'til they had you dusted off
    So you closed your eyes and thought about somethin' else.
    • Redgum, "I Was Only 19", Caught in the Act (1983), verse 3
  • And then someone yelled out "Contact!" and the bloke behind me swore
    We hooked in there for hours, then a God-almighty roar
    Frankie kicked a mine the day that mankind kicked the moon
    God help me
    He was going home in June.
    • Redgum, "I Was Only 19", Caught in the Act (1983), verse 4
  • And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?
    And night time's just a jungle dark and a barking M-16?
    And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
    God help me - I was only nineteen.
    • Redgum, "I Was Only 19", Caught in the Act (1983), chorus
  • As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said that if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.
  • I'm not speaking provocatively here. Unlike the other wars of this century, of course, there were deep divisions about the wisdom and rightness of the Vietnam war. Both sides spoke with honesty and fervor. And what more can we ask in our democracy? And yet after more than a decade of desperate boat people, after the killing fields of Cambodia, after all that has happened in that unhappy part of the world, who can doubt that the cause for which our men fought was just? It was, after all, however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom; and they showed uncommon courage in its service. Perhaps at this late date we can all agree that we've learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win.
  • Erosion of the law on CBW will facilitate assimilation. That is why the controversy regarding the legal status of herbicides and the sensoy irritant agents, such as CS and the tear gases, has been so important. Largely as a result of their employment by the United States and allied forces in Indo-China, and subsequently by their adversaries, CS weapons are now the furthest advanced toward assimilation of all CB weapons. But the Vietnam-related efforts to reduce, through R&D, the technical and operational limitations of CS weapons, and to increase their military utility and attractions for regular combat forces, has inevitably meant a weakening of at least the technological constraint on the assimilation of all types of CB weapons. This, it should be noted, was by no means an unintended consequence of the use of CS, and herbicides as well, in Vietnam.
    During an interview, the U.S. Army Chief Chemical Officer was utterly explicit on this point: the Vietnam war provided a much needed opportunity for him to demonstrate the value of his wares to the Army at large, and for the Chemical Corps to secure that combat role which would enhance its status and protect it from bureaucratic repression in Washington. CS employment chemical crop destruction and chemical defoliation were only three of many CBW proposals put forward by the Chemical Corps for the Vietnam war.
  • Largely as a result of their employment by the United States and allied forces in Indo-China, and subsequently by their adversaries, CS weapons are now the furthest advanced toward assimilation of all CB weapons. But the Vietnam related efforts to reduce, through R&D, the technical and operational limitations of CS weapons, and to increase their military utility and attractions for regular combat forces, has inevitably meant a weakening of at least the technological constraint on the assimilation of all types of CB weapons. This, it should be noted, was by no means an unintended consequence of the use of CS, and herbicides as well, in Vietnam.
  • We went, we served, we did what we were asked.
    • Donald Romancak, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 216

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What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished. This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter reprisal. Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the Mediterranean.... The U.S. now seems to operate on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine... ~ I.F. Stone
 
Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. Hackworth's Digest, the State Department's huge Talmud of international law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare... says reprisals are never to be taken "merely for revenge" but "only as an unavoidable last resort" to "enforce the recognized rules of civilized warfare." Even then reprisals "should not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy." These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials. ~ I.F. Stone
 
The Army said Kurtz’s actions “can only be viewed as a parody on the sickness and brutality of war.” The service maintained that in an actual situation, it would attempt to bring Kurtz back for medical treatment rather than order another officer to “terminate” him. Consequently, the Army said that “to assist in any way in the production would imply agreement with either the fact or philosophy of the film.” ~ Lawrence Suid
  • In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top American military commander in Saigon activated a plan in 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to recently declassified documents cited in a new history of wartime presidential decisions.
    The documents reveal a long-secret set of preparations by the commander, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, to have nuclear weapons at hand should American forces find themselves on the brink of defeat at [[w:Khe Sanh|Khe Sanh, one of the fiercest battles of the war.
    With the approval of the American commander in the Pacific, General Westmoreland had put together a secret operation, code-named Fracture Jaw, that included moving nuclear weapons into South Vietnam so that they could be used on short notice against North Vietnamese troops.
  • But promises were being broken all around. Most of us in Nam were the children of the last war that was ever supposed to be fought anywhere in the world. All of the baby boys were promised that they would grow up and become successful and all of the baby girls were promised that someday their princes would come. Then along came the goddamn government and bingo, it sent the princes off to battle communism and issued them the right to hate anyone not in their unit. Then it sent them home in body bags, or with their handsome faces melted or blown away, their bodies prematurely aged with disease or terrible wounds, and their idealistic souls turned into sewers. And those were the survivors.
  • By late 1967, there were 485,600 American troops in South Vietnam; over the course of the war, nearly 2.6 million American service members would serve in country. While much of the historical discussion around the American military effort has focused on the immense firepower and destruction it entailed, an equally awe-inspiring aspect of the war has been overlooked: logistics.
    Moving more than two million people — along with their weapons, aircraft, food and medical supplies — in and out of the country was an almost unfathomable challenge. Early in the war, South Vietnam, which even after a century of French rule remained a largely rural nation, simply did not have the seaports and airfields required to receive this level of manpower and sustain military operations. America would have to build those facilities, and much more, from scratch. It would be, in the words of The New York Times correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin, “probably the most massive construction effort ever organized and put into the field in so short a time and the ‘largest military construction contract in history.’”
  • By the end of the war, American forces had constructed six new major airports, with 10,000-foot concrete runways, at Bien Hoa, Cam Ranh Bay, Chu Lai, Phan Rang, Tuy Hoa and Phu Cat, and enlarged the two French-built airfields at Da Nang and Saigon; six new airports were also built in Thailand. Some 100 smaller airfields were built around South Vietnam to accommodate helicopters and supply aircraft.
    To care for the growing number of American and Vietnamese service members, Americans built 26 hospitals with 8,280 beds. To receive and hold the millions of tons of supplies shipped over, contractors built 10.4 million square feet of covered storage, as well as 5.5 million square feet of ammunition storage and enough tanker farms to hold 3.1 million barrels of petroleum products. Finally, the military built 26 major base camps around Vietnam, some with shopping malls and movie theaters, as well as hundreds of smaller combat firebases.
  • At Newark airport, I climbed into a taxi. Wearing my uniform with all my ribbons and my Vietnamese airborne beret, I kept waiting for the driving to make a big fuss and exclaim "Hey! You're just back from Vietnam, aren't you!" Nothing. So I fed him hints like, "Gee, I haven't seen Newark for a while." But he dropped me at my mother's place with scarcely a word... I was pretty disoriented. I couldn't think about anything but Vietnam. The war was all over the newspapers, but people seemed not to care. Even when Mom introduced me to a few of her friends, they only said things like, "Well, I guess now you'll be able to get on with your life." No one wanted to know about Vietnam: the public wasn't caught up in the war, not at all like the spirit I remembered from my boyhood, during World War II. After two days I wanted to run through the streets yelling, "Hey! In Vietnam people are dying! Americans are dying! How can you act like nothing is happening?"
  • I had to be a complete son of a bitch to get any results, which often entailed losing my temper five or six times in a day. Being calm and reasonable just didn't work. For one thing the antiwar protests were mounting in the United States and a lot of our draftees knew they'd been sent to an unpopular war and didn't want to fight. Then there was the Army's policy of keeping Vietnam tours to one year, which meant a constant stream of raw recruits and a constant exodus of experienced men. When these new kids arrived, they'd immediately be exposed to a bogus combat-veteran culture that was in reality no more than an accumulation of bad habits. Some other troops would tell them: "Forget that crap you learned in basic training. This is how we do it around here. This is the real thing."
  • My view of the Vietcong never changed. I saw them as opportunistic brigands who with guns and encouragement from the North Vietnamese oppressed the peasants, stole their money and crops, and bullied them into cooperation. I'd have loved to fight a full-scale battle against the Phantom 48th. We had a competent battalion staff and I was quite confident we could have outmaneuvered and destroyed them. But the war had degenerated by then into piecemeal engagements that played to our weaknesses: our shortage of capable junior officers and NCOS, and our draftees' reluctance to fight.
  • I took the red-eye out of San Francisco to Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Thursday, July 23, 1970. As we made our final approach early on Friday morning, we flew straight into a thunderstorm. Wind buffeted the plane, lightning flashed, and just as we reached the runway I watched the right wing outside my window dip sickeningly toward the ground. "Great," I thought, "Ive survived two tours in Vietnam and I'm gonna crash here in front of my wife."
  • I hate to think what my life would have been like if I hadn't had Brenda to come back to after Vietnam. I'd read about Kent State and the antiwar upheavals that spring- at Oberlin, my sister Ruth had organized a workshop to make placards for demonstrations. I'd also heard about antiwar protestors spitting on soldiers. I'd made up my mind even before coming home that I'd punch out anybody who spit on me. Luckily, no one did. But one day that fall, I stopped at a mall in Virginia after work wearing my green uniform. I walked into a department store, and salespeople and other shoppers glared at me. I paid and left as quickly as possible, but getting into the car I thought, "I am in the nation's capital, wearing the uniform of the United States Army, and the people around me see me as some kind of monster!" The mood of the country had turned ugly.
  • Look across that generation gap now and see it as they see it—the young. Thirty two billion dollars into a civil war ten thousand miles from our shore to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese and keep the Viet Cong from attacking San Francisco. That’s where we are told is America’s destiny—in the rice paddies of DaNang. And America’s youth—or at least a sizeable share of them—find this to be patently unbelievable.
    America’s destiny, in their view, lies on the streets of Newark, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and Harlem. That’s where we keep alive the dream. Not in Saigon. And certainly not at the cost of twenty-thousand dead American boys with a hundred-thousand wounded and a half a million civilians put to a torch. Again, the inconsistencies. The Hawks who bleat most loudly for our continuing participation in this war—these are the ones who’ve passed the propositions 14—and woe be unto the oriental who has the temerity to put a garbage can next to his. Again inconsistency.
    Those who shout loudest for fiscal sanity—an end to so-called federal handouts. Stop this nonsense about Federal Aid to education, federal housing, aid to cities. These are the gentlemen who watched us throw two billion dollars to help prop up the French Colonial Government whose good offices are indistinguishable from the North Vietnamese.
  • Patton asked him to go aboard a chopper equipped with a loudspeaker and order his men to surrender. The prisoner quickly refused, and Patton said to him, "If you don't go up in the chopper with me and ask them to surrender you have personally signed their death warrants, because I will be forced to obliterate this position." The NVA captain again declined, and Patton's frustration was evident. He glowered at the man, and said, "Goddamn it, who is winning this war?" "You are," was the reply. "Then in that case," Patton shouted, "why don't we save the lives of your soldiers and let us take them out and feed them and medicate them?" "Sir," he said, "you didn't ask who would win this war." "Well, who is going to win this war?" Patton snorted. "We will," the prisoner said forcefully, "because you will tire of it before we do."
    • Brian M. Sobel, quoting an exchange between George S. Patton, IV and a North Vietnamese Army officer in December 1968, in his book The Fighting Pattons (1997), p. 167-168.
  • However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?
  • Only a few days after the Ia Drang, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was back at the division base camp at An Khe on a cold and rainy Thanksgiving. Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, the battalion commander, met a visiting Westmoreland near the mess hall and told him that everyone was just about ready to eat their Thanksgiving dinners. But Westmoreland told him, "Get them all together and let me talk to them." The troops had been issued a hot meal, real coffee instead of the powdered stuff that came with C-Rations, turkey, and the trimmings. They were walking back to their squad tents to enjoy this special repast when the order was given to assemble. "There stood General Westmoreland himself," said Sergeant John Setelin. "He made a speech there in the rain and while he talked we watched the rain turn that hot dinner into cold Mulligan stew. Who knew what the hell the man said? Who cared?"
    • Lewis Sorley, in his book Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011), p. 96.
  • Got in a little hometown jam
    So they put a rifle in my hand
    Sent me off to a foreign land
    To go and kill the yellow man
    • Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the U.S.A." (1984)
  • What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished. This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter reprisal. Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the Mediterranean.... The U.S. now seems to operate on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine...
  • Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. Hackworth's Digest, the State Department's huge Talmud of international law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare... says reprisals are never to be taken "merely for revenge" but "only as an unavoidable last resort" to "enforce the recognized rules of civilized warfare." Even then reprisals "should not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy." These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials. Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking torpedo boats in two incidents. In neither were our ships damaged nor any of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even took place. To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly punishment to fit the crime....
  • Morse revealed that U.S. warships were on patrol in Tonkin Bay nearby during the shelling of two islands off the North Vietnamese coast on Friday, July 31, by South Vietnamese vessels. Morse said our warships were within three to eleven miles of North Vietnamese territory, at the time, although North Vietnam claims a twelve-mile limit. Morse declared that the U.S. "knew that the bombing was going to take place...[and] charged that the presence of our warships was "bound to be looked upon by our enemies as an act of provocation."
  • As one of our interviewers... says... once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal... After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting. We're just fighting because the military needs to keep going and needs to be funded...
  • In writing to President Johnson in December 1965 about his intention to make a film about the Green Berets, John Wayne explained that it was “extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there . . . The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium.” He thought he could make the “kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world.” According to Wayne, it would “tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization, and action. We want to do it in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow Americans—a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during times of stress and trouble.”
    Unlike earlier wars, however, the Vietnam War did not unite the nation to a common cause, but tore it apart. Michael Wayne, who produced the film for his father’s company, claimed that The Green Berets did not tell a controversial story: “It was the story of a group of guys who could have been in any war. It’s a very familiar story. War stories are all the same. They are personal stories about soldiers and the background is the war. This just happened to be the Vietnam War.”
    On its part, the White House willingly embraced the project. Jack Valenti, then an advisor to President Johnson, advised him that while John Wayne’s politics might be wrong, “insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture, he would say the things we want said.” Wayne himself freely admitted he was doing more than playing his usual soldier role. He saw the movie as “an American film about American boys who were heroes over there. In that sense, it was propaganda.”
    Of all the filmmakers in Hollywood, whether Hawk or Dove, only Wayne was willing to take a financial gamble and make a movie about an increasingly unpopular war. But The Green Berets did not inspire other filmmakers to use Vietnam as a subject for war movies. In fact, until 1975, no one in Hollywood seriously considered producing a major theatrical film about the Vietnam conflict.
  • In coming to the Pentagon with his plans in May 1975, Coppola told Public Affairs officials that his initial script would need considerable work, especially the end, which he considered “surrealistic.” While recognizing that the screenplay had considerable problems, the officials forwarded it to the Army with the recommendation that the service should work with the director so that the completed film “will be an honest presentation.”
    The Army found little basis to even talk to Coppola, responding that the script was “simply a series of some of the worst things, real or imagined, that happened or could have happened during the Vietnam War.” According to the service, it had little reason to consider extending cooperation “in view of the sick humor or satirical philosophy of the film.” Army officers pointed to several “particularly objectionable episodes” which presented its actions “in an unrealistic and unacceptable bad light.” These included scenes of U.S. soldiers scalping the enemy, a surfing display in the midst of combat, an officer obtaining sexual favors for his men, and later smoking marijuana with them.
    The military probably could have lived with at least some of these negative incidents if put in what it regarded as a realistic and balanced context. But, from the initial script onward, the Army strongly objected to the film’s springboard which has Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) sent to “terminate with extreme prejudice” Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has set up an independent operation and is waging a private war against all sides. The Army said Kurtz’s actions “can only be viewed as a parody on the sickness and brutality of war.” The service maintained that in an actual situation, it would attempt to bring Kurtz back for medical treatment rather than order another officer to “terminate” him. Consequently, the Army said that “to assist in any way in the production would imply agreement with either the fact or philosophy of the film.”
  • When I arrived in country, my battalion had been in heavy fighting for weeks. There was only one platoon sergeant left in the entire rifle company, which usually had four or five E7's. I was only an E-6, but immediately became a platoon sergeant. We were in contact every day. The heavy casualties continued, and we received new "fills" of riflemen right out of Basic every four to five days. But you can't replace experienced troops or NCOs like that without destroying unit cohesion, morale, and competency. To clear the enemy out of the Delta, the 9th Division needed to be pulled out, rebuilt, and replaced by at least two American divisions, but that wasn't going to happen. So, the young men in the 9th were left down there to bleed and die. It was truly tragic.
    • Bob Sullivan, Our Vietnam Wars: As Told By 100 Veterans Who Served by William F. Brown, p. 204-205
  • After nine months, I was wounded by shrapnel in my knee and back from an RPG and sent to the rear area. They wanted to reassign me to a mechanized unit, but I wouldn't have that. I wanted to go back to the Riverine Force. Someone else had my job by then, so they put me in a different regiment, but still leg infantry. While all that was going on, they lost my paperwork. Rather than sending me home after my last three months, my new regiment thought I was new in country, and I ended up staying for another ten months. I didn't say anything, because I hated to leave those kids out there on their own with no leadership.
    • Bob Sullivan, Our Vietnam Wars: As Told By 100 Veterans Who Served by William F. Brown, p. 205

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First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies. We never understood them, and that was another surprise. And we knew even less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this dirty kind of business. It's very dangerous. ~ Maxwell D. Taylor
 
[T]he stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some “bad apples,” however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. … [T]hey were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military. ~ Nick Turse
  • I am the mother of two Vietnam vets. One returned and one didn't. The one who didn't was my youngest son, just twenty-two. He wasn't drafted- he enlisted "because the world needs to be a better place and I promised Walter if anything happened to him I would fill his place." Walter, his best friend, was killed in Vietnam at seventeen years of age. I know the outrage these men feel because I, too, was questioned about my sons being in an "unjust war"- once the day he was buried, and other times smugly by parents whose boys avoided the call of their country.
    • Josephine Talty, as quoted in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 260
  • I have been among the officers who have said that a large land war in Asia is the last thing we should undertake. Most of us, when we use that term, are thinking about getting into a land war against Red China. That's the only power in Asia which would require us to use forces in very large numbers. I was slow in joining with those who recommended the introduction of ground forces in South Vietnam. But it became perfectly clear that because of the rate of infiltration from North Vietnam to South Vietnam something had to be done.
    • General Maxwell D. Taylor, interview, "Top Authority Looks at Vietnam War and Its Future", U.S. News & World Report (February 21, 1966), p. 42.
  • The acceptance of the legitimacy of the overt use of power comes hard in some segments of our citizenship. In some of the expressions of concern over our behavior in Vietnam, we are seeing curious aspects of our national character in this regard. They often contain a note of reluctance or of regret over the use of the vast power represented by the resources of the United States at home and abroad. In some quarters there seems to even be what amounts to a certain feeling of guilt arising from our possession of this power and an uneasiness about the morality of our conduct. One consequence of this attitude in the Vietnam situation is that our government must constantly defend its actions to critics and, in so doing, is often obliged to disclose its plans and purposes to a degree which must be vastly helpful to our opponents. Inevitably in a situation such as Vietnam, where we are using limited means to gain limited ends, it is essential to keep the adversary in doubt with regard to the full scope of our intentions.
  • Elements of the information media contributed to prolonging the war by their manner of reporting the news. It required only selective reporting, not deliberate fabrication, to create the impression that we Americans were the prime aggressors bent on expanding the war to avoid impending defeat, and that our alleged successes were really defeats which officials were trying to hide from the American public. Biased reporters found no good to say about our Vietnamese allies, whom they held up to scorn in a way which led the American people to believe that our allies were not worth the sacrifices we were making in their behalf. Such selective and slanted reporting spread defeatism among the tender-minded at home and provided enormous encouragement for Hanoi to hold fast and concede nothing.
  • Of course, the media did not have to manufacture dissent and antiwar feeling in the United States; there was enough of the real article to provide them with legitimate subject matter. Every war critic capable of producing a headline contributed, in proportion to his eminence, some comfort if not aid to the enemy. Unfortunately, from 1967 onward there was no shortage of eminent figures among the opponents of the war willing to make this contribution.
  • We are carrying into the next decade many unresolved problems raised by Vietnam. How can a democracy such as ours defend its interests at acceptable cost and continue to enjoy the freedom of speech and behavior to which we are accustomed in time of peace? To a Communist enemy the Cold War is a total, unending conflict with the United States and its allies- without formal military hostilities, to be sure- but conducted with the same discipline and determination as a formal war. Unless we can learn to exercise some degree of self-discipline, to accept and enforce some reasonable standard of responsible civic conduct, and to remove the many self-created obstacles to the use of our power, we will be unable to meet the hard competition waiting for us in the decade of the 1970s.
  • We all have a share in it, and none of it is good. There are no heroes, just bums. I include myself in that.
    • General Maxwell D. Taylor, commenting on the fall of Saigon and with it the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam, speaking in a UPI interview in May 1975. Quoted from General Maxwell Taylor: The Sword and the Pen (1989), p. 366
  • First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies. We never understood them, and that was another surprise. And we knew even less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this dirty kind of business. It's very dangerous.
    • General Maxwell D. Taylor, quoted in The Certain Trumpet: Maxwell Taylor and the American Experience in Vietnam (1991) by Douglas Kinnard, p. 198
  • Along the road, I saw a situation of disorder and chaos unlike anything I have ever seen before. Aircraft were taking off from the airfield like bees from a shattered beehive. In the river, navy vessels were casting off and setting sail, squadron by squadron. The streets were crowded with vehicles of every description trying to move in all directions. Panicked people ran about trying to find their loved ones. Cars, bicycles, and motorcycles weaved in and out, each trying to push ahead with total disregard for the rules of the road and our traffic laws. Taking advantage of this situation, bad elements surfaced, committing robberies in the streets and looting U.S. offices and private residences belonging to families that had already evacuated. The truck convoy carrying my division headquarters had a great deal of difficulty making it to the corps headquarters, and did not arrive there until 1600 in the afternoon.
    • Brigadier General Mach Van Truong, former commander of the 21st Division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, referencing events in late April 1975. As quoted in Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 255
  • Vietnam is clear, representing another of the tragedies of capitalism. Young men left the U.S.A., traveling 10,000 miles to a country they had never heard of before, actually believing they were sacrificing their lives to advance democracy, to advance history, when in fact they were fighting against themselves.

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  • Throughout the war, the results of the bombing of North Vietnam have consistently fallen far short of the claims made for it. The bombing began with the expectation that it would break the will of the enemy—although many questioned its capability to do so. When Hanoi showed no signs of weakening, the rationale shifted toward interdiction, but this goal, too, proved unobtainable. Many suggested that this failure was because there were too many restrictions. If such targets as the North's petroleum facilities were attacked, it was argued, Hanoi's capabilities would be sharply reduced. But again North Vietnam proved capable of adapting; the will of the Hanoi leadership held strong. Again bombing failed to fulfill the promises made for it.
    • Bombing As a Policy Tool In Vietnam: Effectiveness. A STAFF STUDY BASED ON THE PENTAGON PAPERS. Prepared for the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations. United States Senate. Study No. 5. 12 October 1972. U.S. Government Printing Office

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US forces used artillery, naval gunfire and an occasional air strike to suppress the enemy on the outer wall, but could do nothing about the snipers in the Imperial Palace because the royal residence was a no-fire zone. ~ Erik Villard
 
Hue was one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam war, both in terms of its human cost as well as the amount of physical destruction it generated. ~ Erik Villard
  • ...it is clear that the Paris Agreement did not bring peace to the people of Vietnam. This was because this agreement was not the result of real peace talks; rather, its primary purpose was to implement a "secret" exchange between the two emissaries, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. This exchange would allow North Vietnam to keep troops in South Vietnam and later to take over the country by force of arms. In return, the United States would receive a number of prisoners of war, be allowed to look for Americans missing in action, and be free to withdraw its troops who still remained in South Vietnam in accordance with Richard Nixon's stated goal of "Peace with Honor." In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu had blind and insane confidence in the promises made by President Nixon, so he did not take any precautions. This meant that, in the end, South Vietnam was left helpless when the United States decided to ignore the North Vietnamese communist violations of the Paris Agreement. Today, more than thirty years later, because the content of the "secret talks" between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger is still not known, people still do not know whether the help the United States gave North Vietnam and the VC was intentional or unintentional, but it sacrificed South Vietnam by refusing to intervene when the communists violated the agreement and by cutting military aid. In the end, South Vietnam got no peace and the United States got no honor. In any case, President Nguyen Van Thieu's dictatorial policies, both foreign and domestic, were a complete failure, even during the nation's most dangerous hours. In the end, the Republic of Vietnam was destroyed at the end of April 1975, surprising our opponents and causing a powerful shock to many nations throughout the world.
    • Colonel Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 235-236
  • With respect to North Vietnam's conquest of the Republic of Vietnam, North Vietnam had initially projected that it would take two years for it to implement its plan to capture South Vietnam. In 1975, the North Vietnamese planned to cut South Vietnam in half and then create conditions to allow for the unification of North and South Vietnam in 1976. In fact, ironically, the North Vietnamese captured all of South Vietnam during the spring of 1975, in the space of less than two months. No one ever anticipated that it would take North Vietnam only fifty-five days- beginning on 10 March 1975 when its troops crossed the Vietnamese-Cambodian border to attack Ban Me Thuot and ending on 30 April 1975, the day the unconstitutional President Duong Van Minh announced an unconditional surrender at 1015 in the morning, after a little over two days in office as president. As soon as Duong Van Minh made this announcement, North Vietnamese and VC troops advanced straight into Saigon with virtually no opposition, because almost all our troops deployed into defensive positions laid down their arms following General Minh's orders, and then escaped rather than trust their lives to the communists.
    • Colonel Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 236
  • During the final ten days, from 21 to 30 April 1975, South Vietnam was like a headless chicken. President Nguyen Van Thieu suddenly abandoned his post at the last minute. New president Tran Van Huong, who was not protected by the constitution of the Republic of Vietnam, did nothing during the few days he was in power other than argue about the powers of his presidency. The few houses of the RVN Parliament did not respect the constitution and betrayed the nation. The unconstitutional President Duong Van Minh, out of blind faith in the "Tripartite Government" solution, demanded that he be given the post of chief of state one more time. However, just like the last time he was chief of state, General Minh did not have a firm understanding of the situation and did not have the capacity to resolve major problems. Even more damaging, General Minh was tricked by the North Vietnamese communists and the VC into complete immobility at the end. Acting like a defeated general, at 1015 in the morning of 30 April 1975 General Minh ordered ARVN units to lay down their arms. After SUpreme Commander Duong Van Minh issued the order to surrender, most of the ARVN soldiers assigned to defend the capital city put down their weapons, but they refused to lower their heads and surrender to the communists. They disbanded on their own, taking off their uniforms and disguising themselves as civilians in order to escape rather than to submit to being arrested and humiliated by the communists. A number of heroic soldiers, out of anger or out of humiliation, committed suicide before the communist army entered Saigon. One shining example was Lieutenant Colonel Long, a police officer, who committed suicide in front of the South Vietnamese National Assembly building after receiving the surrender order. In IV Corps, even though our army was still in control of the situation and Major General Nguyen Khoa Nam still had three elite infantry divisions, along with navy and air force units, under his command, all of South Vietnam was delivered into the hands of the North Vietnamese communists. The North Vietnamese then disbanded the NLFSVN.
    • Colonel Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 237
  • It is regrettable that the role of the RVN soldier had been smeared by certain American media and by the propaganda machine of the communists during the war. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, thirty years after the defeat of the Americans and the Vietnamese, right in Washington, D.C., the truth about the Vietnam War is still distorted. Indeed the daily Viet Nam Moi (New Vietnam) announced on 9 October 2004: "In an interview on September 29, 2004, Bill O'Reilly from Fox News asked President George W. Bush about the Vietnam War. O'Reilly: 'The South Vietnamese didn't fight for their freedom, which is why they don't have it today.' It was ironic to hear the President's reply: 'Yes.'"
    • Colonel Ha Mai Viet, Steel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 345
  • “Hue was one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam war, both in terms of its human cost as well as the amount of physical destruction it generated,” says Erik Villard of the US Army Centre of Military History, who specialises in the Vietnam war.
    The citadel of Hue, widely regarded as the cultural capital of Vietnam, became the key battleground in 25 days of urban warfare which raged within its walls, gardens and moats.
    According to Villard, 216 US servicemen and 421 South Vietnamese troops were killed in the action, and some 1,600 US soldiers and 2,100 South Vietnamese wounded. North Vietnamese losses were estimated at 2,500 to 5,000.
  • On both sides of the road over 50 percent of the people's houses were destroyed. There wasn't a shadow of a human, and no animals. It was cold, and all was ruined and destroyed. In truth it was a dead city.
    • Le Huy Linh Vu in a report following a visit to Quang Tri City and La Vang in Quang Tri Province on 29 April 1972, as quoted by Colonel Ha Mai Viet inSteel and Blood: South Vietnamese Armor and the War for Southeast Asia (2008), p. 131

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After 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers slipped into the poorly guarded city of Hue in February of 1968, it took a month of intense fighting, principally by American Marines, to root them out. ~ Bing West
 
So immense had been the sacrifices made through so many long years that the South Vietnamese deserved an end- if it had to come to that- with more dignity to it. ~ William Westmoreland
 
Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don't diminish the pressure, you increase it. ~ William Westmoreland
  • The Vietnamese struggle is the most significant political event of our generation. Understanding the history of the Vietnam war is a key to understand the present world situation, the present US governmental crisis, the present possibilities for the revolutionary movement here, and a correct anti-imperialist perspective.
  • I was a junior in high school in 1968, during the Tet Offensive. The disaster of Tet marked the beginning of the end of American public support for the war, as was apparent even in the small private high school I attended. Although most of my peers were the children of well-heeled, conservative civilians, they were rapidly shedding their willingness to automatically rubber-stamp those values. I, however, was a steadfast Teenage Republican, and gave a speech for Richard Nixon in our school's mock elections that fall. Later the same year I passionately defended the Vietnam War before my speech class, keenly aware that my classmates, most of them apolitical or liberal, could not have seen me as more alien if I'd leaped off a Huey (helicopter gunship) into their midst.
    • Mary Edwards Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (1991), p. 323
  • In the fall of 1969, barely a month after I arrived on campus for my freshman year, word spread of a huge peace demonstration planned in Washington, D.C., just a few hours away. The night before the demonstration, one of my civilian friends spotted me on campus and shouted, "Come on! We've got a van going to D.C. and there's just enough room for you! Hurry up!" To my friend's consternation, I refused. "Why not?" he asked in disbelief, stopping in his tracks. I had told no one of the conflict that tormented me. Yes I was against the war, but no I was not antimilitary. Yes I wanted to protest, but no I didn't want to condemn country and military wholesale. What would it mean to lend my presence to a huge, historic demonstration that would only be read one way? My friend searched my face for an answer. "I can't go," I finally told him, "because armbands only come in black, not in shades of gray." He stared at me blankly, then shook his head and ran off to join the caravan.
    • Mary Edwards Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (1991), p. 324
  • Military brats during the Vietnam War covered the whole spectrum of opinion, from those wholly supporting the war, to those wholly condemning it, to those who declined to take a position. What I believe all had in common, however, was a sensitivity to the real human beings serving in the military who were swept into the hell that was Vietnam. The children of warriors did not find it easy to swallow the caricature of the military as a monolithic, inhuman juggernaut thriving on death and destruction. We all knew someone who had served there, someone who had died there. For us the warriors were not faceless and inhuman: They were our fathers, our brothers, our cousins. We could not condemn them. And that point alone was enough to divide us from our many civilian peers.
    • Mary Edwards Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (1991), p. 325-326
  • One thing I believe all of us children of the Fortress sensed in our gut: The opposition to the war was too simplistic. It condemned too broadly, too blackly. Where it should have focused clearly on national policy and those who shaped it, the movement blindly condemned those charged to carry out the war, who had little freedom to refuse. It is true that there were individuals in the military who did refuse, and who accepted the consequences. Where these acts were morally driven, it is possible to say those individuals were courageously obeying a higher law. But it was and is unrealistic to imagine an entire armed force laying down its weapons in mutiny against an unpalatable foreign policy. And it is purely fanciful to imagine that soldiers should pick and choose the wars they wish to fight; that's the last thing any country would want, for nation-states depend absolutely on their warriors to do as they are commanded without question or hesitation. Therefore to condemn wholesale hundreds of thousands of soldiers who did not desert or mutiny but went, as ordered, into the nightmare of the Vietnam War, is not only to misplace the blame, but to lack compassion. On this point military brats of both Right and Left stand united.
    • Mary Edwards Wertsch, Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress (1991), p. 327
  • After 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers slipped into the poorly guarded city of Hue in February of 1968, it took a month of intense fighting, principally by American Marines, to root them out. One reason was gross negligence by the high command in estimating the enemy’s strength. A deeper reason was the physical reality of urban density, trapped civilians, stout houses, and massive stonewalls. There was no avoiding house-to-house fighting to force back a determined enemy. In terms of total fatalities among friendly and enemy troops and civilians, the result was, to quote Bowden, “well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest [battle] of the Vietnam War.”
  • The enemy had achieved in South Vietnam neither military nor psychological victory. For the South Vietnamese the Tet offensive served as a unifying catalyst, a Pearl Harbor. Had it been the same for the American people, had President Johnson discerned the same support behind him that Thieu did behind him, and had he acted with forcefulness, the enemy could have been induced to engage in serious and meaningful negotiations. Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don't diminish the pressure, you increase it.
  • As any television viewer or newspaper reader could discern the end in South Vietnam, in April 1975, came with incredible suddenness, amid scenes of unmitigated misery and shame. Utter defeat, panic, and rout have produced similar demoralizing tableaux through the centuries; yet to those of us who had worked so hard and long to try to keep it from ending that way, who had been so markedly conscious of the deaths and wounds of thousands of Americans and the soldiers of other countries, who had so long stood in awe of the stamina of the South Vietnamese soldier and civilian under the mantle of hardship, it was depressingly sad that so much misery should be a part of it. So immense had been the sacrifices made through so many long years that the South Vietnamese deserved an end- if it had to come to that- with more dignity to it.
  • In the renewed war in South Vietnam beginning in the late 1950s, the considerable success that Giap and the Viet Cong enjoyed was cut short by the introduction of American troops. In the face of American airpower, helicopter mobility, and fire support, there was no way Giap could win on the battlefield. Given the restrictions they had imposed on themselves, neither was there much chance that the Americans and South Vietnamese could win a conventional victory; but so long as American troops were involved, Giap could point to few battlefield successes more spectacular or meaningful than the occasional overrunning of a fire-support base. Yet Giap persisted nevertheless in a big-unit war in which his losses were appalling, as evidenced by his admission to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he had by early 1969 lost half a million men killed. Ruthless disregard for losses is seldom seen as military genius. A Western commander absorbing losses on the scale of Giap's would have hardly lasted in command more than a few weeks.
  • Forced in January 1973 by American pressure to to accept a cease-fire agreement that left well over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops inside South Vietnam and free access for tens of thousands more, South Vietnamese leaders surely had reason to believe that if their enemy seriously violated the agreement, the United States would interfere. Yet that was not to be. In the face of that grave psychological blow for the South Vietnamese, it required no military genius to assure South Vietnam's eventual military defeat.
  • Ironically, the North Vietnamese victory could have come much sooner. In view of the increasing commitment of American troops in the mid- and late 1960s, General Giap would have been well advised to abandon the big-unit war, pull in his horns to take away the visible threat to South Vietnam's survival, and thereby delude the Americans that they had already achieved their goal of making the South Vietnamese self-sufficient. President Johnson had given Giap that chance at the Manila conference of 1966 when he had announced that once "the level of violence subsides," American and other foreign troops would withdraw within six months. That would have been eight years before the eventual South Vietnamese defeat, long before the South Vietnamese armed forces would have had any claim to self-sufficiency. Making that offer at the Manila conference may well have been an effort by President Johnson to rid himself of the albatross of South Vietnam, whatever the long-range consequences. For once the United States had pulled out under those circumstances and Giap had come back, what American President would have dared risk the political pitfalls involved in putting American troops back in?
  • Dating from the days of the Geneva Accords of 1954, the refugees always flowed south, not north, and even those Americans who long maintained that the refugees were not fleeing the enemy but American shelling and bombing would have to admit that even after American shelling and bombing stopped, the flow was still always southward. So it was until the final deplorable end. How could anyone genuinely believe that the South Vietnamese people had no desire to forestall the march of totalitarianism, to maintain their freedom- however imperfect- when for years upon years they bore incredible hardships and their soldiers fought with courage and determination to do just that? They carried on the fight under a government that many Americans labeled unrepresentative, repressive, and corrupt. No people could have pursued such a grim defensive fight for so long without a deep underlying yearning for freedom.
  • Pro-lifers’ reactions against the Vietnam War pushed the movement further to the left. In the early years of the movement, opponents of abortion, most of whom were staunchly anticommunist, had been reluctant to say anything against the nation’s military effort in Vietnam. They were New Deal liberals and advocates of the civil rights movement, but in the mid-1960s, they hesitated to link themselves to a radical student cause that would put them at odds with their nation’s government and with some of the nation’s highest-ranking Catholic clerics, including New York archbishop Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had endorsed the war as a necessity in the fight against Communism. Indeed, one of the leading pro-life books of the late 1960s, Charles E. Rice’s The Vanishing Right to Live, explicitly condemned those who refused to serve in Vietnam. But by the end of the decade, some pro-lifers concluded that if they valued human life before birth, they also needed to protect the lives of those already born and join the campaign against the war. After Fr. James McHugh, founder of the National Right to Life Committee and director of the bishops’ Family Life Bureau, included a discussion of the ethics of war in the model homily on abortion that he sent to the nation’s Catholic priests in January 1969, an increasing number of pro-lifers began talking about the injustice of the war in Vietnam, as well as the arms race. The definitive antiabortion publication of 1970, a 500-page tome by Georgetown philosophy professor Germain Grisez, condemned the nuclear arms race as unethical and questioned the morality of the Vietnam War, saying that it “poses many problems from an ethical point of view”. Despite conservative Catholics’ initial reluctance to issue an unmitigated condemnation of the war, denunciations of the nation’s military effort in Vietnam became widespread in the pro-life movement by 1972. “We cannot be selective in our love for life,” Detroit’s archbishop, Cardinal John Dearden, declared in September 1972. “The very same reasons call on us to protect it wherever and however it is threatened, whether through the suffocation of poverty or in villages ravaged by napalm or unborn life in a mother’s womb”.
  • In 1969, while on medical leave from Vietnam, I took my mother up the road to have lunch and to get reacquainted. When we got up to pay and leave the fellow in the next booth got up and blocked our path. This was not a hippie or some punk protester- this was a man in his thirties, blue-collar worker, probably married and with one or two kids of his own. He insisted on informing me that I wasn't a real soldier and I didn't know what war was because he had fought in Korea! He said anyone could get a Purple Heart now just for the asking, and that the three I now wore were bullshit. This man, supposedly the mainstay of our country, was prepared to start a fight at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in a restaurant. Who the hell was this guy? I didn't know him, had never met him, nor done anything to him. Was the whole country being brainwashed? It was then and is now beyond my power to describe the anger and hatred I felt then, and still feel today. What intelligent people we have bred that they can be led by the nose by whoever makes the most noise! As disappointing as I'm sure it must be to some, I am not some neurotic vet desecrating society every time I'm released from the psych ward of the local VA. In fact I'm married with three kids (none of them neurotic either), a $100,000 home in the suburbs, and my own company. My feelings are still strong and buried just slightly below the surface. Today I do business with a great many of these same people who symbolically, if not physically, spit on us when we came home from Vietnam. They think I'm a great guy. I don't boast about my service time, yet I don't hide it, either. I wait with patience hoping that some day these very same people will have the opportunity to burn in hell while I laugh.
    • Dale White, as quoted by Bob Greene in Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam (1989), p. 266

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They put Diem over there. Diem took all their money, all their war equipment and everything else, and got them trapped. Then they killed him. Yes, they killed him, murdered him in cold blood, him and his brother, Madame Nhu's husband, because they were embarrassed. They found out that they had made him strong and he was turning against them…. You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer is in bad shape… ~ Malcolm X
  • You put the government on the spot when you even mention Vietnam. They feel embarrassed — you notice that?... It's just a trap that they let themselves get into. … But they're trapped, they can't get out. You notice I said 'they.' They are trapped, They can't get out. If they pour more men in, they'll get deeper. If they pull the men out, it's a defeat. And they should have known that in the first place. France had about 200,000 Frenchmen over there, and the most highly mechanized modern army sitting on this earth. And those little rice farmers ate them up, and their tanks, and everything else. Yes, they did, and France was deeply entrenched, had been there a hundred or more years. Now, if she couldn't stay there and was entrenched, why, you are out of your mind if you think Sam can get in over there. But we're not supposed to say that. If we say that, we're anti-American, or we're seditious, or we're subversive…. They put Diem over there. Diem took all their money, all their war equipment and everything else, and got them trapped. Then they killed him. Yes, they killed him, murdered him in cold blood, him and his brother, Madame Nhu's husband, because they were embarrassed. They found out that they had made him strong and he was turning against them…. You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer is in bad shape….
    • Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements edited by George Breitman, January 1965, p. 217

Carole C. Fink, Cold War: An International History (2017)

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The US involvement in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had spread to Europe and Asia. ~ Carole C. Fink
  • The Soviet Union hastened to endorse the Bandung principles, and the United States began to ease its hostility toward nonalignment (which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had denounced as "morally bankrupt"), acknowledge the diminishing appeal of its security pacts, and court independent Third World governments. Vietnam was an exception. The Eisenhower administration, which had refused to sign the Geneva Accords, feared a communist victory in the national elections and a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. After the French withdrawal, the United States proceeded to build up a client state in the south, allowing President Ngô Đình Diệm to cancel the 1956 elections and to clamp down on his opponents. Contrary to the Geneva Accords, which forbade the Vietnamese from entering foreign alliances or allowing foreign troops into Vietnam, Dulles mobilized the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to agree to protect South Vietnam against communist aggression. When a popular insurgency, which Diệm contemptuously labeled Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) erupted in the south two years later and received support from the north, Eisenhower expanded US economic and military aid and personnel on the ground. Between 1955 and 1961 the United States poured more than $1 billion in economic and military aid into the Diệm regime, and by the time Eisenhower left office there were approximately one thousand US military advisers in South Vietnam.
    • p. 96-97
  • The US intervention in Vietnam was not inevitable. It evolved from the vacuum left by the collapse of Japan's Asian Empire, followed by the communists' victory in China, the Korean stalemate, and France's defeat in 1954. But it also grew out of the Cold War decisions of three US presidents: Truman's to move away from Roosevelt's anticolonialism and back the French, Eisenhower's to block the Vietnamese national elections in 1956 and prop up the Diệm regime, and Kennedy's to increase the number of US military advisers, Special Forces, and CIA agents in South Vietnam. All three intended to transform Vietnam into a "proving ground for democracy in Asia."
    • p. 124
  • Three months before the presidential election Johnson had already obtained his justification for going to war. From the beginning of 1964 the US military had taken over direction of the CIA/South Vietnamese covert commando attacks against North Vietnam as well as naval intelligence gathering in the coastal areas (known as DESOTO patrols). On August 1, 1964, shortly after a South Vietnamese commando attack on two islands, the destroyer Maddox entered the Gulf of Tonkin for the purpose of collecting electronic intelligence. The next day, as it approached the island of Hon Me, it encountered three North Vietnamese torpedo boats whose signals had been intercepted. The Maddox fired, damaging only one of them. Two days later, the Maddox, now joined by a second intelligence vessel, C. Turner Joy, again fired on what appeared to be approaching enemy ships, although no evidence has ever been found of a second North Vietnamese interception.
    • p. 126
  • Although neither US ship had been hit and there were no casualties, Johnson immediately ordered a retaliatory bombing raid against North Vietnamese naval bases. Evoking America's dread of surprise assaults, Johnson appealed for public support against an "unprovoked attack" in international waters. After Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the US Navy had "played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any," Johnson on August 7, 1964 won near-unanimous Senate approval for a resolution authorizing him to use US military force to defend the freedom of South Vietnam, a measure his administration had prepared earlier in the spring. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution enabled Johnson to spurn proposals that fall for another Geneva conference to achieve a negotiated settlement over Vietnam.
    • p. 126
  • Shortly after his overwhelming electoral victory, Johnson moved quickly to rescue South Vietnam from an imminent collapse. In 1965 he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and by the end of the year he had dispatched 180,000 combat troops as well. Although this dramatic escalation contained several cautious elements, Johnson had transformed South Vietnam into a Cold War struggle and one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history.
    • p. 127
  • In selecting bombing targets, Johnson avoided destroying North Vietnamese dams and ports and thereby provoking a Chinese intervention although the Ho Ch Minh Trail was bombed, Johnson made no moves to invade Laos or attack the Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia; and US forces confined themselves to search-and-destroy operations against enemy units and largely refrained from involvement in local politics.
    • p. 127
  • The US involvement in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had spread to Europe and Asia. Critics of the war condemned America's atrocities against the civilian population- North and South- and its use of chemical weapons, and they called for an immediate US withdrawal. Antiwar activists derided Washington's claim of battling Chinese communism to save Asians from tyranny, and deplored America's opposition to the third World's struggle for independence. To the generation raised after World War II and the Holocaust, America's claim to defend freedom against a tiny, tenacious people, and its support of a corrupt and repressive puppet government, rang increasingly hollow.
    • p. 129
  • The conclusion of the Vietnam War underscored the paradox of US-Soviet détente that had been complicated by the emerging US-Sino-Soviet triangle. Although the Superpowers had committed substantial resources to the struggle in Southeast Asia, neither had fully controlled its clients. Both had expected the other to be more accommodating than either was willing to be, or even capable of being. To be sure, Hanoi's victory in 1975 created more diplomatic and economic problems for Moscow as well as for Beijing, while America's defeat- although a severe political and psychological blow- had left its triangular diplomacy unimpaired. Nonetheless, America's war in Vietnam had reinforced the nation's growing conviction that the struggle against global communism must no longer be fought solely by US soldiers.
    • p. 162-163

Ronald E. Powaski, The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (1998)

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Shortly after assuming the presidency, Johnson said privately, "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went. If the United States pulled out of Vietnam, Johnson warned on one occasion, "it might as well give up everywhere else- pull out of Berlin, Japan, South America." ~ Ronald E. Powaski
 
With the Sino-Soviet split deeper than ever, even after Krushchev's demise, both communist powers tried to outdo each other in helping North Vietnam. Their combined assistance between 1965 and 1968 exceeded $2 billion, an amount that more than offset the losses North Vietnam suffered from U.S. bombing. In addition, between 1962 and 1968 approximately 300,000 Chinese soldiers went to North Vietnam, 4,000 of whom were killed. Though not participating in ground combat, they helped operate antiaircraft weapons and communications facilities. ~ Ronald E. Powaski
 
The Tet offensive was a significant military victory for the United States, but it was also a stunning psychological defeat. To most Americans, who had been subjected to repeated administration claims that the war was being won, it seemed incredible that the communists could mount such an impressive offensive. ~ Ronald E. Powaski
  • Johnson was equally determined to prevent the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, but the price the United States had to pay in lives and money to do so would be much higher than in Latin America. Between November 1963 and July 1965, Johnson transformed Kennedy's program of limited U.S. assistance to South Vietnam into an open-ended commitment to defend that country. By 1968 the United States would have over 500,000 troops in Vietnam. Johnson believed, probably correctly, that South Vietnam would collapse if the United States did not expand its participation in the war. Remembering the conservative backlash against the Truman administration after the communist takeover of China, Johnson believed he could not abandon South Vietnam and remain in the White House. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Johnson said privately, "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went. If the United States pulled out of Vietnam, Johnson warned on one occasion, "it might as well give up everywhere else- pull out of Berlin, Japan, South America."
    • p. 155.
  • Although Johnson consulted with congressional leaders before he committed combat units to Vietnam, he did not request another congressional resolution authorizing him to do so. He felt that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution already provided sufficient authorization. Moreover, he did not want to put the country on a war footing, because he feared a public backlash against U.S. involvement in the conflict; he also wanted to maintain congressional and public support for his Great Society reform program, which he feared might be set aside if the war were given priority status. Johnson believed that he could wage war and implement a major reform program simultaneously, something no other president had ever attempted. Ultimately, Johnson's decision to expand the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam would force him to withdraw from the presidential campaign of 1968. The Republican victory in the election that November would mean the end of Johnson's Great Society program as well as the inauguration of a new Vietnam policy.
    • p. 156-157.
  • One reason for the failure of Johnson's Vietnam policy was the inherent unworkability of U.S. military strategy. The gradual escalation of the U.S. bombing campaign allowed the North Vietnamese sufficient time to disperse their population and resources and to develop an air defense system that would destroy a large number of U.S. aircraft. Moreover, the U.S. Army never developed a consistent strategy for stopping the infiltrations of regular North Vietnamese units and supplies into the South. General Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy was designed primarily to protect the cities of South Vietnam while killing as many Vietcong as possible. Westmoreland grossly miscalculated North Vietnam's willingness to suffer huge losses in manpower as well as its capacity to replace those losses. An estimated 200,000 North Vietnamese males reached draft age each year, far more than U.S. forces could kill. North Vietnam was able to sustain its war effort by drawing on both Soviet and Chinese military and economic assistance. With the Sino-Soviet split deeper than ever, even after Krushchev's demise, both communist powers tried to outdo each other in helping North Vietnam. Their combined assistance between 1965 and 1968 exceeded $2 billion, an amount that more than offset the losses North Vietnam suffered from U.S. bombing. In addition, between 1962 and 1968 approximately 300,000 Chinese soldiers went to North Vietnam, 4,000 of whom were killed. Though not participating in ground combat, they helped operate antiaircraft weapons and communications facilities.
    • p. 157.
  • Without question, the presence of the Chinese military in North Vietnam was largely intended to deter a U.S. invasion, and, clearly, it was successful in doing so. Fearing that an expansion of the ground war into North Vietnam would again bring Chinese soldiers into conflict with U.S. troops, as had happened in the Korean War, the administration refrained from taking that step. Unwilling to fight an all-out war with North Vietnam, Johnson ensured that the conflict would become a war of attrition. In such a war the communists were bound to win because they were willing to accept much higher casualties than were the American people.
    • p. 157.
  • With no prospect of either a military or diplomatic end to the war, the carnage inevitably grew. By late 1967 the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action reached 13,500. Many Americans were wondering if the war was worth the mounting deaths that were so vividly displayed on the nightly news. Slowly, American public opinion turned against the administration. College students in particular became bitter opponents of the war. But the opposition to the conflict also increased in Congress, with Senators William Fulbright (Dem.-Ark.) and Wayne Morse (Rep.-Ore.) leading the attack, bringing to a standstill legislative progress on Johnson's cherished great society program. By 1967 growing demonstrations against the war and vicious personal criticism of the president had made Johnson a virtual prisoner in the White House. The increasing unpopularity of the war, however, did not sway Johnson from his goal of preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam. For the president in 1967, there was no acceptable alternative but a continuation of the war. Accordingly, in August 1967 he approved General Westmoreland's request for an additional 45,000-50,000 troops, but he imposed a new ceiling of 525,000 military personnel, a level that was not surpassed for the remainder of the war. In November 1967 Westmoreland assured Johnson that the United States was "turning the corner" in Vietnam.
    • p. 160.
  • Then, much to the surprise of U.S. intelligence, the supposedly nearly beaten North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a major offensive against the cities of South Vietnam in February 1968. Coinciding with the Vietnamese Tet holiday, the communist forces attacked more than 100 towns and cities, including Saigon, where the grounds of the U.S. Embassy were penetrated, and Huế, the ancient capital of Vietnam, which the communists held for more than a month before they were driven out. While American and South Vietnamese forces were able to repel the communist onslaught, and inflict enormous losses on the enemy in the process, they also suffered heavy casualties. The Tet offensive was a significant military victory for the United States, but it was also a stunning psychological defeat. To most Americans, who had been subjected to repeated administration claims that the war was being won, it seemed incredible that the communists could mount such an impressive offensive.
    • p. 160-161.
  • After Tet, with no end to the war in sight, a Gallup poll in March 1968 reported that a clear majority of "Middle America" had turned against the administration. The same poll showed that Johnson's approval rating had reached a new low of 30 percent. General Westmoreland seemed oblivious to the growing hostility of the American people and Congress toward the war. He insisted that the communists had been dealt a crippling blow during Tet and that the war could be won by launching new ground offensives against their bases in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, and by intensifying and expanding the bombing campaign, especially around Hanoi and Haiphong. To implement this strategy, Westmoreland requested an additional 206,000 troops.
    • p. 161

Mark G. Toulouse, “CHRISTIAN RESPONSES TO VIETNAM: THE ORGANIZATION OF DISSENT”, University of Chicago Religion and Culture Web Forum (June 2007)

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Most of the Protestant churches stand mindless and mute before the great events which shake the ecclesiastical, cultural and social foundations of our time. ~ Christian Century
 
Do the churches have anything to say to the world about the world’s affairs that the world cannot say just as well to itself? We need to devise methods of answering this question, even though in the process we run the risk of conflict and division. Better turmoil in the church than total irrelevance. ~ Christian Century
 
Near the year’s end, Christian leaders were certain that the war was winding down. Little did they know that the number of Americans killed would nearly double before war’s end. Between March 1968 and March 1969, the total number of dead grew from 19,670 to 33,641, (more than the 33,629 that represented the total number of Americans killed in the Korean War). The total count of the dead would grow to nearly 58,000 within the next three years.
 
"when the civil rights movement and opposition to the war in Vietnam made the church’s liberal posture so right.” The church could be sure in those days, on those issues, that it was on the right side: “the cause was just and the issues clear-cut. Or so they appeared.”
  • Up to about 1965, the dissent expressed in the pages of Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis had been fairly mild. The journals largely supported America’s motive for its presence in Vietnam. Prior to the 1964 presidential election, support for American policy had been consistent. After 1965, editorials began openly to question the escalation carried out by Johnson. They criticized the failure to negotiate, and the impossible conditions expected before negotiations could take place. In the fall of 1965, Christians began to organize more effectively against the war. At that time, the existing dissenting Christian groups were largely composed of pacifists. Further, the newer dissenting groups representing the New Left, were often as willing to overlook violence on the left as they were to reject it on the right. There seemed to be no middle ground. Many Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders sought a way to express their dissent without identifying completely with any of the existing groups.
    • p.1
  • Tom Cornell, a leader among the Catholic Worker movement, a friend and veteran of draft card burnings, described draft card burning and the effect of Johnson’s legislation in the movement’s newsletter: In psychological terms it’s a kind of castration symbol and an Oedipal thing. Your kid is flying in the face of authority. . . . There is a kind of civil or state religion which has subsumed large elements of Christianity, Judaism, whatever else there is, and it has its symbols, obviously secular symbols like the flag, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. It’s subsumed a good part of our traditional real religion. And the draft card then becomes a sacrament. And there’s nothing worse that you can do in sacramental terms than defile a species of the sacrament. And this was a defilement, a real blasphemy against the state.
    • Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, "Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975", (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1984), 51-58; as qtd. on p. 2.
  • In most cases, the major fear behind these restrictions was the fear that controversial issues would lead to conflict and, ultimately, division. Therefore, the Century editor concluded, “most of the Protestant churches stand mindless and mute before the great events which shake the ecclesiastical, cultural and social foundations of our time.” Since Protestants want no one to speak on their behalf, “no one knows whether there is a majority opinion and commitment” about pressing issues. No one knows whether a consensus exists and, if it does, “no one knows whether it is Christian.” He continued: It may be that in the United States Christians are now so thoroughly dispersed in and absorbed by the general fabric of society that it is wholly impossible to obtain a Christian opinion on anything. It may be that the churches are saying nothing about the issues facing the people because as churches they have no mind to speak. . . . If this is the situation we need to know it. Do the churches have anything to say to the world about the world’s affairs that the world cannot say just as well to itself? We need to devise methods of answering this question, even though in the process we run the risk of conflict and division. Better turmoil in the church than total irrelevance.
    • “Mindless and Mute,” Christian Century (10 November 1965): 1371-1372; as qtd. on p.4
  • Editors at the Century and Christianity and Crisis expressed their opposition to American policies even more strongly as 1965 gave way to 1966. Commonweal increasingly expressed its doubts about the wisdom of the current direction of the war effort. Though none of them called for what might be described as a “precipitous” withdrawal of forces, they insisted on United Nations intervention and unconditional negotiations that would include a significant role for the National Liberation Front (NLF) in a post-war Vietnam. They condemned Johnson’s shift in policy that seemed committed to the mistaken notion of seeking an “all out military victory” in the “undeclared war” in Vietnam. Commonweal reversed its previous support for short-term bombing efforts and joined the other two journals in calling for an immediate stop to all bombing. Meanwhile, Christianity Today and America continued their efforts to encourage American resolve in Vietnam and to defend the continued bombardment of North Vietnam. The war would end the second the aggressors from North Vietnam stopped their aggression. Of these three journals with serious questions about the war, Christianity and Crisis found itself in the most unusual position. Its birth in 1941 came because it opposed Christian isolationism, especially the neutralist and pacifist sentiments so present in the Christian community at the time. Niebuhr and his colleagues at Christianity and Crisis took the lead in providing a strong Christian rationale for American intervention in World War II. But in 1966, they stood absolutely opposed to American military action in Vietnam.
    • p. 5.
  • The dissent against the war that by 1972, became so loud and far-reaching that it helped force America to withdraw, had very little to do with pacifism. That dissent was composed of liberals and conservatives with a vast array of moral philosophies and motives. Hunter is correct, however, in his brief description of the peace movement’s overall concern for the use of economic resources. Throughout the war, most protestors—pacifist or not—expressed regular concern about the effect of the war on Johnson’s “Great Society” program. The consistent theme resounded that billions of dollars spent annually in an unnecessary war effort could have been better used at home.
    • p. 7.
  • From 1966 on, this kind of argument emphasizing the disjuncture between values and behavior became predominant in the journals opposing the war. In April 1966, the Century claimed that the use of idealistic arguments to support American involvement in Vietnam no longer worked. The “self-righteous argument” that Americans were in Vietnam “because a freedom-loving people summoned us to their aid” had “eroded and collapsed not because wise men exposed its error – . . . but because it can no longer stand against the relentless assaults of unfolding events.”
    • “America Non Grata,” CC (20 April 1966): 483; as qtd. on p. 10.
  • Borrowing a phrase of Senator William J. Fulbright from the title of his well-known series of talks at Johns Hopkins University during the spring of 1966, American dissenters to the war were not so much bothered by the use of power; they were instead bothered by the “arrogance” that accompanied America’s use of power, an arrogance that violated America’s expressed ideals. Fulbright compared the country’s arrogance to that of Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. These comparisons, especially the one to Hitler, upset many Americans, but such comparisons became frequent in many peace circles after 1966.
  • King’s speech linked the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam in a way that made many black leaders uncomfortable. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, Jr. both criticized his speech. The board of the NAACP passed a resolution to keep the two movements separate. King’s speech recognized that the connections were not something one chose, but rather intrinsic to what both movements were about: In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” . . . Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” . . . So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be saved are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
  • He called for a “radical revolution of values.” Revolutions were taking place all over the globe, he told his audience. “It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.” King offered a five-step program “to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam.” He called for an end to all bombing; a unilateral cease fire with the goal of beginning negotiations; the curtailment of all military build-up elsewhere in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Laos; acceptance of the NLF as a player in any future Vietnamese government; and the establishment of a date for all foreign troops to leave Vietnam. He urged the church to seek out “every creative means of protest possible.” To all ministers who held ministerial exemptions, he recommended giving them up in order to seek conscientious objector status, a status that most likely would be denied. The injustice of the war needed to be exposed in whatever ways were possible. The next week, King’s name was listed as a national co-chair of CALCAV. On April 15, the Spring Mobilization gathered between 150,000 and 400,000 protesters (estimates vary) in New York City and another 50,000 in San Francisco. The antiwar movement had gained considerable strength. Meanwhile, some 438,000 troops were now in Vietnam
    • Martin Luther King Jr., “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam,” in The Vietnam War: Christian Perspectives, 114-130; as qtd. on pp. 14-15
  • Evangelical supporters of the war never seemed to question their own support of the war, or to interpret it as an example of dabbling in political affairs or approving military strategy. They had no problem reporting that Billy Graham, after making a visit to Vietnam, "said that Americans should back their President in his decision to make a stand in Viet Nam.” In the words of the Century, “they have made their peace with this evil thing . . . Is it not ironic?”
    • “Graham Preaches Peace in Viet Nam,” CT (20 January 1967): 36-37; “Danger on the Home Front,” CC (25 January 1967): 99-100; as qtd. on p.18
  • In a letter to the editor, Graham chided the Century for attributing to him an opinion about the war. “I have been extremely careful,” he wrote, “not to be drawn into either the moral implications or the tactical military problems of the Vietnam war.” The Century responded by reminding Graham of the many ways he had passed judgment: his recent condemnation of King’s address, his protest against protesters, describing them as “giving comfort to the enemy,” and his many examples of vocal support of American policy in Vietnam. From “his position high above life’s sordid arena,” the editor wrote, “Graham plunged into the dangerous waters of opinion.” One wonders what the Century would have written if they had known that a few years later, Graham used his influence with Nixon to “gain draft exemptions for Campus Crusade staff members, contending that, though unordained, they were doing the work of ministers.”39 Events during the Vietnam and Nixon years did not do much to draw out Graham’s better qualities.
    • Billy Graham as quoted in William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 146; as qtd. on p.18.
  • Near the year’s end, Christian leaders were certain that the war was winding down. Little did they know that the number of Americans killed would nearly double before war’s end. Between March 1968 and March 1969, the total number of dead grew from 19,670 to 33,641, (more than the 33,629 that represented the total number of Americans killed in the Korean War). The total count of the dead would grow to nearly 58,000 within the next three years.
    • pp.19-20.
  • Catholic opposition to the war began to grow considerably beginning in 1967. By July, a plurality of Catholics opposed further escalation (52% opposed; 36% in favor). Editors at America lagged considerably behind. By January 1971, 80% of Catholics favored the return of all military personnel by the end of the year. That same year, in November, Catholic Bishops issued a collective resolution declaring that the Vietnam War no longer met just war criteria. “It is our firm conviction,” their statement read, “that the speedy ending of this war is a moral imperative of the highest priority.”
    • p.20
  • The most radical dissent among evangelicals came from the Post-American (later Sojourners) community. Led by James Wallis and founded in 1971, this community of students at Trinity Evangelical Seminary in Deerfield, Illinois, came under the watchful eye of the FBI for their protests against Vietnam. They took the name “post-American” for their journal because they had given up on America’s values. They regarded American society as “oppressive” and beyond redemption. Christians needed to assume a post-American posture. Wallis viewed the Christian response to Vietnam as proof that the church in America was “captive and . . . morally impotent.” For the Post-American crowd, allegiance to America in the Vietnam era meant disobedience to God. Wallis and his community represented a new movement among young evangelicals, one far to the left of the Century in its view of social revolution and Vietnam. After the war, other evangelicals accused Wallis of being blind to the plight of the refugees because of his blind support for the unification of the country at all costs under the revolutionary principles of North Vietnam.
    • Wallis, “The Desire to Forget,” Post-American (March-April, 1973): 1-3. For evangelical condemnation of the community’s view of refugees, see Lloyd Billingsley, “Radical Evangelicals and the Politics of Compassion,” in Piety & Politics, ed. Richard J. Neuhaus and Michael Cromartie (Lanhau, MD: University Press, 1987), especially 211-212 ; as qtd. on p. 22.
  • In 1978, James Wall, the new editor of the Century, took a nostalgic look back at the 1960s, “when the civil rights movement and opposition to the war in Vietnam made the church’s liberal posture so right.” The church could be sure in those days, on those issues, that it was on the right side: “the cause was just and the issues clear-cut. Or so they appeared.” Living through that period caused some to believe that the church could always speak with clarity and authority in the public arena. There is a tendency when things seem so clear to assume that God’s blessing absolutely supports your position. The danger lurking in this assumption is illustrated by the Century’s endorsement of Johnson over Goldwater in 1964. They were sure Johnson was God’s man for the job, so sure that they were willing to lose their tax exempt status to say so. As Wall pointed out, it is dangerous to ignore the ambiguity that exists in every human situation. The Christian position has to be willing to embrace “ambiguity” and the willingness to recognize that God “sanctifies no single political solution.”
    • Wall, “Living in the Political Briar Patch,” CC (1 November 1978): 1027-1028, as qtd. on p. 23.

Dialogue

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Lyndon B. Johnson Telephone Call With Senator Richard Russell (May 27, 1964)

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I don’t know how in hell you’re going to get out, unless they [the South Vietnamese government] tell you to get out. ~ Richard Russell Jr.
as quoted in "The Vietnam War Transcript Trump Needs to Read", by Jeff Green Field, Politico Magazine, (September 27, 2017)
  • Johnson: What do you think about this Vietnam thing? I’d like to hear you talk a little bit.
Russell: Well, frankly, Mr. President, it’s the damn worse mess that I ever saw, and I don’t like to brag and I never have been right many times in my life, but I knew that we were going to get into this sort of mess when we went in there. And I don’t see how we’re ever going to get out of it without fighting a major war with the Chinese and all of them down there in those rice paddies and jungles. I just don’t see it. I just don’t know what to do.
Johnson: Well, that’s the way I have been feeling for six months.
Russell: Our position is deteriorating and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they are willing to do for themselves. It is a mess and it’s going to get worse, and I don’t know how or what to do. I don’t think the American people are quite ready for us to send our troops in there to do the fighting. If I was going to get out, I’d get the same crowd that got rid of old Diem [the Vietnamese prime minister who was overthrown and assassinated in 1963] to get rid of these people and to get some fellow in there that said we wish to hell we would get out. That would give us a good excuse for getting out.
Johnson: How important is it to us?
Russell: It isn’t important a damn bit for all this new missile stuff.
Johnson: I guess it is important.
Russell: From a psychological standpoint. Other than the question of our word and saving face, that’s the reason that I said that I don’t think that anybody would expect us to stay in there. It’s going to be a headache to anybody that tries to fool with it. You’ve got all the brains in the country, Mr. President—you better get a hold of them. I don’t know what to do about this. I saw it all coming on, but that don’t do any good now, that’s water over the dam and under the bridge. And we are there.
  • Johnson: Well, they’d impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?
Russell: I don’t think they would. I don’t know how in hell you’re going to get out, unless they [the South Vietnamese government] tell you to get out.
Johnson: Wouldn’t that pretty well fix us in the eyes of the world and make us look mighty bad?
Russell: Well, I don’t know, we don’t look too good right now, going in there with all the troops, sending them all in there, I’ll tell you it'll be the most expensive adventure this country ever went into.
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  1. ↑ Gelb, Les and Gladstone, Brooke (January 12, 2018). What the Press and "The Post" Missed. On The Media.
  2. ↑ Peter Arnett (February 8, 1968), ["Major Describes Move", The New York Times, p. 14. This two-sentence article began, "BENTRE, Feb. 7 (AP)—'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today."
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