Vietnam War Quotes

“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.”
― Muhammad Ali

“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“There was something that resonated on a deep… spiritual level… about cutting a man in half.”
― William Kely McClung, Super Ninja: The Sword of Heaven

“Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland. It was for fear of being beaten to this beat that black soldiers avoided the Saigon bars where their white comrades kept the jukeboxes humming with Hank Williams and his kind, sonic signposts that said, in essence, No Niggers.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
― Ho Chi Minh

“Yea though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil...because I am the meanest motherfucker in the Valley.”
― Bruce H. Norton, Force Recon Diary, 1969: The Riveting, True-to-Life Account of Survival and Death in One of the Most Highly Skilled Units in Vietnam

“In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.”
― Jan Karon, Home to Holly Springs

“The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn’t who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies.”
― Robert Koger, Death's Revenge

“We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truely the future he had envisioned for us.”
― Joseph L. Galloway

“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 Best and the Brightest

“A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war.”
― Glenn Greenwald, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

“We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Don't step off the road --- There might be another one!”
― James M. McGarrity

“And in this moment, I realize one reason it's so great to have a best friend is sometimes, like right now, Cal and I are thinking the very same thing.”
― Kimberly Willis Holt, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town

“The U.S. imperialists supply armaments to their henchmen to massacre the Indochinese peoples. They dump their goods in Indochina to prevent the development of local handicrafts. Their pornographic culture depraves the youth in areas placed under their control. They follow the policy of buying up, deluding and dividing our people. They strive to turn some bad elements into U.S. agents that they use for the conquest of our country.”
― Hồ Chí Minh, Against US Aggression For National Salvation

“Too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam.”
― Don DeLillo

“It seems like our town has closed down these days leading up to the funeral. Old people still sit on their porches and talk, but their conversations aren't sprinkled with laughter anymore. Since the new, little kids haven't played outside, as if their moms are afraid someone might snatch them out of their yards and send them off to war.”
― Kimberly Willis Holt, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town

“The U.S. imperialists are expanding their war against national independence and peace in Vietnam. They are committing monstrous atrocities and crimes more odious than the Hitlerite fascists.”
― Hồ Chí Minh, Against US Aggression For National Salvation

“The Mozart sonata Dad picked out begins to play. When we hear the first note, we open the sacks and the ladybugs escape through the opening, taking flight. It's as if someone has dumped rubies from heaven. Soon they will land on the plants in search of bollworm eggs. But right now they are magic-red ribbons flying over our heads, weaving against the pink sky, dancing up there with Mozart.”
― Kimberly Willis Holt, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town

“Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS.”
― Tim O'Brien

“For all those who shared their stories - and for those with stories yet to be told.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“It is becoming increasingly clear that, without an effective government, backed by a loyal military and some kind of national consensus in support of independence, we cannot do anything for South Vietnam. The economic and military power of the United States … must not be wasted in a futile attempt to save those who do not wish to be saved.”
(Page 399)”
― Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall

“Czy przed atakiem byli oni sympatykami Wietkongu, czy też stali się nimi dopiero po nim?”
― Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing

“I never doubted who that VC was. To this day, I firmly believe that grunt and I could have ended the war sooner over a beer in Saigon than Henry Kissinger ever could by attending the peace talks.”
― Michael Kathman

“It is well-written, interesting, and humorous and has a level of substance that belies its given storyline, looking at not only the culture of the camp but also of the late 1960s. ...Overall, Polo has given us a great read.. US BOOK REVIEWS”
― US BOOK REVIEWS

“By the time a settlement was reached, at the beginning of 1973, under terms no better than Washington could have had in 1963 or 1964 to 1965, fifty-eight thousand Americans, and between 1.5 and three million Vietnamese, lay dead.”
(Page 335)”
― Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam

“During one of his liaison trips to Hanoi, Harry had his now-famous exchange with his North Vietnamese counterpart. When Harry told him, "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield," Colonel Tu responded, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
― david t. zabecki, Vietnam Magazine