VIETNAM WAR QUOTES IV

quotations about the Vietnam War

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In America's nonlinear war, with no frontline or clear political or territorial goals, the number of enemy killed apparently revealed who was "winning".... The military "kill" becomes the primary target -- simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance.

PAUL HAM

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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 advisors, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the communists.

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Tags: John F. Kennedy

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Vietnam was no mistake -- it was a war crime.

YALE MAGRASS

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After 15 years in Iraq with little end in sight, the White House is expanding our military footprint into Syria and Yemen. Like Vietnam, we have to wonder what, exactly, we're fighting for and what our nation is sacrificing to gain it.

EDITOR

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We were combat photographers, and our jobs were as relevant and justifiable--or as irrelevant and unjustifiable--as anyone's in Vietnam.

NICK MILLS

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The Vietnam War was a decade of agony that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. Not since the Civil War have we as a country been so torn apart. There wasn't an American alive who wasn't affected in some way. More than 40 years after it ended, we can't forget Vietnam, and we are still arguing about why it went wrong, who was to blame and whether it was all worth it.

KEN BURNS

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Ho Chi Minh may have been an evil man; Nixon may have been a great man. The Americans may have had the just cause; we may not have had the just cause. But we won and the Americans were defeated because we convinced the people that Ho Chi Minh is the great man, that Nixon is a murderer and the Americans are the invaders. The key factor is how to control people and their opinions. Only Marxism-Leninism can do that. None of you ever see resistance to the Communist regime, so don't think about it. Forget it. Between you -- the bright intellectuals -- and me, I tell you the truth.

MAI CHI THO

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Death, like a great eagle, flew over Vietnam and picked out its prey. What a waste.

JO VABOLIS

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I knew I wanted to pursue a career that works with helping people. I went to school taking classes both for psychology and math. I ended up pursuing math because it was one of the areas in my life where there were answers. The Vietnam War was going on and a lot of people I knew were fighting in the war and I couldn't quite figure out why these people I knew and cared for were dying in the war. It was just nice to have one little spot in my life where I could figure it out and get an answer.

CATHY GUNVALSON

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I see a generation of young people who have not heard about the stories of Vietnam. Who have not heard about that part of our nation's history and has not experienced the lessons we can learn from it.

JIM PAGLIARINI

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Golden-age TV: cartoons, commercials, cowboys, comedians and caped crusaders, all coming across together at quantum-level intensity, in a single frantic continuum of noise, color, and light--child-world dreams of aggression and escape mixed up with moralistic fantasies of heroism beleaguered yet ultimately regnant in a world of lurking, omnipresent dangers and deceits--in sum, a composite high-melodrama and low-comedy videotape of the American soul. Vietnam was all that and more. Just when the spirit of the thing seemed to be straining hardest, however fecklessly, after some grand and sublime seriousness, the matter of the thing was generally well into the process of slopping all the way over into the ludicrous and banal other side; and when things were not happening this way, of course, they were happening in reverse.

PHILIP D. BEIDLER

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My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Ages.

CURTIS E. LEMAY

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The outcome of the Vietnam War was not the fault of American servicemen, who were dispatched by D.C. politicians to a land many hadn't even read about. But they shouldered a disproportionate burden of the blame.

LNP EDITORIAL BOARD

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All we are saying is give peace a chance.

JOHN LENNON

Tags: John Lennon

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Scholars have argued that America recovered from its amnesia about the Vietnam War only when Ronald Reagan -- who pronounced in 1980 that "it's time that we recognized that ours was in truth a noble cause" -- became president, opening the gates to a wave of American texts about the war.

MAUREEN RYAN

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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

Tags: Noam Chomsky

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It should go without saying that the Vietnam War is remembered by different people in very different ways. Most Americans remember it as a war fought between 1965 and 1975 that bogged down their military in a struggle to prevent the Communists from marching into Southeast Asia, deeply dividing Americans as it did. The French remember their loss there as a decade-long conflict, fought from 1945 to 1954, when they tried to hold on to the Asian pearl of their colonial empire until losing it in a place called Dien Bien Phu. The Vietnamese, in contrast, see the war as a national liberation struggle, or as a civil conflict, depending on which side they were on, ending in victory in 1975 for one side and tragedy for the other.... The point is not that one perspective is better or more accurate than the other. What's important, rather, is to understand how the colonial war, the civil war and the Cold War intertwined to produce such a deadly conflagration.

CHRISTOPHER GOSCHA

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Vietnam is often called the first truly televised war. This isn't exactly right. There were silent films depicting World War I, and government-made newsreels during World War II. But the Vietnam war was the first conflict for which there was a mass television audience in the United States. At the start of the Korean War, in 1950, just 9 percent of American households had a television. By the time the U.S. suffered its first casualties in Vietnam, less than a decade later, more than 85 percent of American households had TVs. Vietnam was, in this way, the first "living-room war," as it is sometimes called, a description that's as apt as it is unsettling.

ADRIENNE LAFRANCE

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The hallmark of the literary responses to the "overwhelming ambiguity" of the Vietnam War is an avant-garde, postmodernist technique that echoes the characteristics of much late 20th-century American literature: an ironic, even absurdist sensibility; a fragmented, discontinuous story line; a fundamental distrust of definable meaning.

MAUREEN RYAN

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The legacy of the Vietnam War is contested ground 40 years on. Textbooks and popular culture rarely reflect upon this major loss for the U.S. military. Although many ordinary Americans would now agree that this was an unwinnable war not worth fighting, politicians and policy makers do not necessarily agree, and their voices are loud. Their argument is that America was too weak, withheld its power, did not do enough to suppress internal dissent, and could have won the war if not for betrayal by the liberals. This serious misreading of history has led to further unsuccessful adventures, for example in Afghanistan and Iraq.

ERIC A. GORDON

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