Quotes & Sayings About War In Vietnam

We obviously don't live in a perfect world. If we did, then my dad would never have volunteered for Vietnam so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college, Uncle Google would have more important things to do than searching for eight hundred million reasons why our schools suck, and I wouldn't be at an education leadership conference in Jakarta because there'd be no need for it ... right? — Tucker Elliot

There is one other wall, of course. One we never speak of. One we never see, One which separates memory from madness. In a place no one offers flowers. THE WALL WITHIN. We permit no visitors. Mine looks like any of a million nameless, brick walls - it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul; that part of me which reason avoids for fear of dirtying its clothes and from atop which my sorrow and my rage hurl bottles and invectives at the rolled-up windows of my passing youth. Do you know the wall I mean? - Steve Mason, U.S. Army captain (Vietnam), poet Excerpted from the poem "The Wall Within" by Steve Mason, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran considered the unofficial poet laureate of the Vietnam War. "The Wall Within" was read at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and was entered in its entirety into the Congressional Record. — Kevin Sites

Most dramatically, the Bridge served as an agonizing or exhilarating psychological symbol for the more than 1.2 million servicemen and women who sailed beneath it during World War II and for those soldiers and Marines who saw it from the air as their chartered World Airways or Flying Tiger plane took off from the Oakland Airport, banked westward across both bridges, and headed to Vietnam. Seen upon departure, whether from the channel or the air, the Golden Gate Bridge expressed the life left behind and the fearsome dangers to come. Seen upon return, the Bridge suggested safe harbor, recovery, the joy of life in years that now would be theirs. — Kevin Starr

President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone. — William Westmoreland

You don't have to be Dave Halberstam to see that the American role in both conflicts [the Iraq war and the Vietnam conflict] is characterized by arrogance, ignorance and self-delusion at the highest levels of government. — Jonathan Yardley

I didn't expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they've sanded away all but the outcroppings of history - the museums, the memorials. — Evan Osnos

A storm swept the world in 1968. It started in Vietnam, then blew across Asia, crossing the sea and the mountains to Europe and beyond. A brutal war waged by the U.S. against a poor southeast Asian country was seen every night on television. — Tariq Ali

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons. — Adrienne Rich

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars. — George Galloway

Having gone through the civil rights struggle, having gone through the anti-Vietnam War struggle, by the time I was in my 20s, I had something that the current generation doesnt have. And that is a sense of efficacy. — Paul Solman

I would like to ask a question. Would this sort of war or savage bombing which has taken place in Vietnam have been tolerated for so long, had the people been European? — Indira Gandhi

Back on the block they probably call Big Al "Fat Albert" but here in the Nam we don't insult our friends. — Derrick Wolf

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. — Michael Herr

I'm an old guy, and I was protesting during the Vietnam War. We killed fifty Asians for every loyal American. Every artist worth a damn in this country was terribly opposed to that war, finally, when it became evident what a fiasco and meaningless butchery it was. — Kurt Vonnegut

In America, it is reported by some sources that there were more domestic violence related murders in the home than the 58,000 Americans soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War — Sara Niles

This edition of The Making of a Quagmire differs in a number of ways from the original one. Approximately one-third of the text has been cut in an effort to eliminate material that seemed clearly redundant or that did not relate directly to the Vietnam war. — David Halberstam

I had never fought in the Vietnam War and had dinner in Paris on the same day. I had no context to understand the casualties or the romance a parent feels on the same day. — Jim Gaffigan

I was kind of feeling a spiritual need all those years. My wife Geraldine and I went to an Episcopalian Church for a while. Oh, it just seemed very political to me that a guy so liberal was talking about opposing the war in Vietnam and I didn't want to hear that when I went to church. I wanted something spiritual. — Robert Novak

The Vietnam war will not be over until it ends for everyone. Over four hundred thousand U.S. veterans are still recovering from wounds inflicted on their bodies and their spirit. Sixty-three million souls in Vietnam are still suffering from their 'victory. — Le Ly Hayslip

I'm sure some of the things I went through pale in comparison to what some of the guys went through in World War II and other conflicts. On top of all the shit they went through in Vietnam, they had to come home to a country that spat on them. — Chris Kyle

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service. — John F. Kerry

Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War. — Jackson Katz

The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition. — Sylvester Stallone

We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%. — Warren Buffett

In the late 60's I was enrolled at Occidental College majoring in philosophy and taking several studio art classes, but I dropped out. It was a very confusing time with the war in Vietnam and the social changes sweeping the nation. — Stephen Beal

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people. — Thurston Clarke

None of us laughed at Helen. Maybe because in 1970 we listened more to new ideas, however sentimental or foolish they sound all these years later in the harsh light of the millennium's end. We wanted to find new answers for old questions, or we just thought there were new answers. And even with all the death that came daily, the death that would come to our gathering in the meadow, life in America felt as if it were being recast, reshaped, even redeemed by some transcendent thing. — Scott Lax

Have you ever had any anger about President Bush - who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard - running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that, or have you been? — Dan Rather

Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to — Kate Atkinson

During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in - and which we lost - every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high. — Kurt Vonnegut

war historian Paul Fussell suggests that in World War II heavy drinking was the answer to fear, boredom and the terrible damage to the sense of identity experienced by so many combatants. Drunkenness, he writes, did for the men of this war what drugs did for the next generation in Vietnam. — Liz Byrski

It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong. — Cass Sunstein

If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place. — Brendan Fraser

Nothing existed outside ourselves and school. For us, the world of politics, social revolution, the war in Vietnam never happened. — Rachel Klein

I was so opposed to the war in Vietnam that I initially refused President Nixon's urgings for me to go there. — Sammy Davis Jr.

It doesn t require any particular bravery to stand on the floor of the Senate and urge our boys in Vietnam to fight harder and if this war mushrooms into a major conflict and a hundred thousand young Americans are killed it won t be U.S. Senators who die. It will be American soldiers who are too young to qualify for the Senate. — George McGovern

More Medals of Honor were given for the indiscriminate slaughter of women and children than for any battle in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. — Aaron Huey

When it came to the Vietnam War, Mr. McNamara was an early advocate of escalation but came to realize the flaws in the American approach earlier than many of his colleagues. Yet in public, he continued to defend the war. — Samantha Power

I hold the door to the post office open for a weathered man in a wheelchair. He is gracious, thanking me. One leg is missing, and just as I notice this, I see the sticker on the back of his chair: VIETNAM VETS.

My thoughts jumble as an ache brews in my heart. I think of war and how it destroys, divides, and damages. I see the faces of those in the refugee camp and those who found their names on The List and are now in America. I want to tell this wounded soldier that I am sorry for his loss and for the abandonment he may have felt upon his return. I want to say other things, but right now I'm just honored to hold the door for him. — Alice J. Wisler

Have you folks been following the controversy with John Kerry and his service in Vietnam and the Swift Boat campaign? It all took place in Vietnam and now it just won't go away. I was thinking about this - if John Kerry had just ducked the war like everybody else he wouldn't have this trouble. — David Letterman

I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager. — Burt Rutan

There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor
both black and white
through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. — Martin Luther King Jr.

During the day on Monday, Washington time, the airport at Saigon came under persistent rocket as well as artillery fire and was effectively closed. The military situation in the area deteriorated rapidly. I therefore ordered the evacuation of all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam. — Gerald R. Ford

I don't think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me. I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation's well-being. — George McGovern

According to historian Ellen Hammer, he (Pres. Kennedy) was, 'shaken and depressed.' to realize that, 'the first Catholic ever to become a Vietnamese chief of state was dead, assassinated as a direct result of a policy authorized by the first American Catholic president.' At one point an aide tried to console him by reminding him that Diem and Nhu had been tyrants.
'No," he replied. "They were in a difficult position.' They did the best they could for their country. — Stephen Kinzer

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka. — James Buchan

The price of gold was fixed at $35 an ounce in 1934, but by the time the U.S. got through the Korean War, the Vietnam war, with all the associated secular inflation, the price level had gone up nearly three times. — Robert Mundell

We must never forget that if the war in Vietnam is lost ... the right of free speech will be extinguished throughout the world. — Richard M. Nixon

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. — George Packer

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' became 'the prime target, simply because the essential political target is too elusive for us, or worse, because we do not understand its importance'. — Paul Ham

He says when you're smoking a cigarette with someone, and you have a lighter, you should light their cigarette first. But if you have matches, you should light your cigarette first, so you breathe in the 'harmful sulfur' instead of them. He says it's the polite thing to do. He also says it's bad luck to have "three on a match." He heard that from his uncle who fought in Vietnam. Something about how three cigarettes was enough time for the enemy to know where you are. Bob says that when you're alone, and you light a cigarette, and the cigarette is only halfway lit that means someone is thinking about you. — Stephen Chbosky

Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam. — Ron Paul

I know of no scholar more dedicated to bringing a thorough and accurate portrayal of America's involvement in Vietnam than Mark Moyar. Everyone who is interested in a full picture of that oft-misunderstood war should be grateful for his effort. — Jim Webb

'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed. — James Dobson

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle. — Barry Goldwater

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. "Well, Lyndon," Mister Sam answered, "you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once." It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam. — David Halberstam

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.
And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.
And they never came down
for they found,
the ground
is Pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong. — Gary Snyder

I was arrested in 1965 for opposing the war in Vietnam. There were 39 of us arrested that day. But thousands opposed us. And the majority of the people in the country supported the war then. — Bill Ayers

I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world. — Martin Luther

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale's story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full (1998).52 — Epictetus

How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? — Noam Chomsky

I never would've imagined in the first part of my life that I could've stood up and said anything. The war in Vietnam changed me. I was so angry. Some of my speeches probably weren't well considered. — Jane Fonda

What we do with this peace-whether we preserve it and defend it, or whether we lose it and let it slip away-will be the measure of our worthiness of the spirit and sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands who gave their lives in two World Wars, Korea, and in Vietnam. — Richard M. Nixon

The majority of the American population had questioned the justification for the war in Vietnam. They did not appreciate the government's rationale for sending American boys to die halfway around the world; communists in Vietnam had absolutely nothing to do with them. — Calvin Murphy

The war on terror is the most insane and immoral war of all time. The Americans are doing what they did in Vietnam, bombing villages. But how can a civilised nation do this? How can you can eliminate suspects, their wives, their children, their families, their neighbours? How can you justify this? — Imran Khan

I'm a child of the '60s, I came of age then. I went to a couple of demonstrations, and then in the late '60s when the Vietnam anti-war movement grew as the Vietnam War was heating up, I became very involved in that. — Simi Linton

It could well be argued that the continuing rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. But the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war. — Frederick Forsyth

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor
inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing
permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. — Howard Zinn

The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review. — Terence McKenna

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer. — Joe Haldeman

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead. — Tim O'Brien

Yes and no. Because America has only about 1 percent of the population serving in the military, it is hard for many civilians to understand the sacrifices military families make. However, my experience is that after the Vietnam War, the public learned that they should support the military whether or not they support the war. You've seen that outpouring of support for the veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan. — Steve Stivers

Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam. — Dan Jenkins

The emphasis on technology over an understanding of the realities of war and conflict reflect[s] the ahistoricism not only of too much of the U.S. military officer corps, but of the American educational system as well. Our mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan were the result of a pervasive failure to understand the historical framework within which insurgencies take place, to appreciate the cultural and political factors of other nations and people, and to encourage the learning of foreign languages. In other words, in Afghanistan and Iraq we managed to repeat many of the mistakes we made in Vietnam, because America's political and military leaders managed to forget nearly every lesson of that conflict. — Peter R. Mansoor

We Americans are too often like children, steeped in moral tales that lack complexity and nuanced meaning.

(from the foreword in The War I survived Was Vietnam by Michael Uhl) — Steve Rees

The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C. — H.R. McMaster

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war. — Tom Brokaw

Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location. — Trevor Boddy

My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic. — Walter Dean Myers

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money. (On Vietnam War) — Charles De Gaulle

But I am scared. Everybody's scared."
"You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas.
"You see where I'm going with this?'
"Well, yeah."
"I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part. — Ben Fountain

When I grew up, in Taiwan, the Korean War was seen as a good war, where America protected Asia. It was sort of an extension of World War II. And it was, of course, the peak of the Cold War. People in Taiwan were generally proAmerican. The Korean War made Japan. And then the Vietnam War made Taiwan. There is some truth to that. — Ang Lee

As many people have chronicled, the decision to fight in Vietnam was a years-long accretion of step-by-step choices, each of which could be rationalized at the time. Invading Iraq was an unforced, unnecessary decision to risk everything on a 'war of choice' whose costs we are still paying. — James Fallows

I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy. — William Westmoreland

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968 ... Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops ... Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces. — Chalmers Johnson

As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him.
An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred. — Jaime Allison Parker

A photograph can make you feel so many different things. When you look at war photographs of Vietnam, or something similar, it makes you feel anguish and sadness and pain. Then in other moments, when you look at Jackie Kennedy walking down Fifth Avenue, that makes you feel glory and richness. — Mario Testino

Did you know that the percentage of young people in the crucial 'youthquake' age bracket of 15 to 24 was higher in 1973 than in 1967 ? Therefore it was glam rock that ended the war in Vietnam. — Ozzy Osbourne

Now. 1973. Exactly." He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. "So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we've drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe.? And is there any purpose to our lives? — Susan Richards Shreve

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in Northern cities like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the Black Power Movement. It was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuum of this whole process of democratization. — Danny Glover

The Philippines and the U.S. have had a strong relationship with each other for a very long time now. We have a shared history. We have shared values, democracy, freedom, and we have been in all the wars together in modern history, the World War, Second World War, Cold War, Vietnam, Korea, now the war on terrorism. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

In 2003, Congress authorized the construction of a visitor center for the Vietnam Memorial to help provide information and educate the public about the memorial and the Vietnam War. — Dennis Cardoza

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February? — Rebecca Goldstein

Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn't until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon. — Jody Williams

With respect to where we are now, we have a voluntary army. And if we ever go back to conscription I hope that at time it will be the kind of conscription that was put in at the end of the Vietnam War. And that is, everybody is equally liable to be called to serve the nation in time of conflict. — Colin Powell

Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori
a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind. — Scott Russell Sanders

Uncle fought in Vietnam and then he fought a war all by himself. — Bob Dylan

Widowhood conferred a mystery and status divorce lacked. The difference between returning World War II and Vietnam veterans. Both had been through a war, but a judgmental public conferred glory only on those who had been victimized in a socially acceptable manner. — Nevada Barr

For more than a decade, the United States had been giving large-scale military aid to the French colonialists, and then to the American-installed but authoritarian South Vietnamese government, to fight nationalists and communists in Vietnam. More than 23,000 U.S. military advisers were there by the end of 1964, occasionally engaging in combat. On the other side of the world, the American public knew and cared little about the guerrilla war. In fact, few knew exactly where Vietnam was. Nevertheless, people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was essential to resist communist aggression. — Edward S. Greenberg

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war. — Wes Craven