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

“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

“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

“The chanting went on, the musicians giving in to the rhythm of their own being, finding healing in touching that rhythm, and healing in chanting about death, the only real god they knew.”
― Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn

“The Americans won't win. They're not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.”
― Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“Much of my early career was spent working with two of the most toxic chemicals ever discovered, dioxin and aflatoxin. I initially worked at MIT, where I was assigned a chicken feed puzzle. Millions of chicks a year were dying from an unknown toxic chemical in their feed, and I had the responsibility of isolating and determining the structure of this chemical. After two and a half years, I helped discover dioxin, arguably the most toxic chemical ever found. This chemical has since received widespread attention, especially because it was part of the herbicide 2,4,5-T, or Agent Orange, then being used to defoliate forests in the Vietnam War."


T.Colin Campbell”
― T. Colin Campbell, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss, and Long-term Health

“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 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

“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

“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

“We are the Unwilling, Doing the Impossible, For the Ungrateful.”
― James L Kinsey, Unwilling Warriors: Surviving the Vietnam War

“She had tried to live an honest life, but the war had given her no choice. It had forced her to make up a version of herself which was acceptable to others. In a way, making up stories had been the basis of her survival and her success.”
― Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Dust Child

“Whatever the case, after you see the damage a mortar round can do, the word incoming! becomes the scariest word you know.”
― Dennis Bourret

“Shortly after midnight, two huge explosions erupted somewhere in the middle of the hamlet. Some kids suggested we should run back home, but my brother stopped them, reasoning that, "It is war; you guys may get shot along the way.”
― Sam Huynh, From Saigon to Katum: Two Exchanges of War

“A hailstorm of rocket-propelled grenades, thundering mortars, and AK-47 machine-gun fire strafed the exposed men from all directions. The Marines of Mike Company had walked into an ambush laid by over 2,500 well-camouflaged North Vietnamese warriors.

It seemed as if the Angel of Death was swooping down upon the Americans like a swift sword.

Instead of rescuing their fellow comrades, the Marines now faced complete annihilation. Outnumbered, out-gunned, and exposed, there was nowhere to hide. Would any of them survive to see the setting sun?”
― Doyle D. Glass, Swift Sword: The True Story of the Marines of MIKE 3/5

“Despite CIA rhetoric that gave Phoenix a sanitized, technical patina, the program soon devolved into an exercise in brutality that produced many casualties and few verifiable results.”
― Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation

“Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War

“With every door closed to them, Vietnam veterans shut up, swallowing the shame of a nation. They attempted to slot back into their old lives the way society expected, but they weren’t the same men, and the holes they had left behind didn’t fit them any more.”
― Ruth Clare, Enemy: A True Story of Courage, Childhood Trauma and the Cost of War