Dorthy Arch

“Richard Nixon was elected president mendaciously promising not victory, but a “secret plan” to bring the war to an “honorable end.” The secret plan prolonged the conflict seven more years, spreading misery and death throughout Indochina. Nixon began gradually drawing down the number of Americans fighting there in 1969, and— catastrophically, as it turned out— began shifting the
military burden to Saigon.

General Abrams threw greater and greater responsibility for prosecuting the war to the ARVN [South Vietnamese military], shifting his efforts to disrupting and destroying Hanoi’s delivery of troops and matériel. This is what prompted the raids into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnam had long sheltered troops and supply routes. The bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia destabilized that neutral country, leading to the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge, which would be responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians in ensuing years.”
― Mark Bowden, Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam

“He noticed that a bedraggled and desiccated pink poppy was growing out of a crack where the wall of the teacher’s house intersected with the cobbles of the street.”
― Louis de Bernières, Birds Without Wings

“We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Dios me había dado su amor en la forma de un pequeño milagro.”
― Todd Burpo, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back