Dear America Quotes

“They tell me the letters I write to you and leave here at this memorial are waking others up to the fact that there is still much pain left, after all these years, from the Vietnam War. But this I know. I would rather to have had you for 21 years, and all the pain that goes with losing you, than never to have had you at all.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“Today, he writes, “there are two people in this body of mine—the crazy young fool back there in 1967-68, who keeps that year alive—vividly alive—17 years later; and the older man, now 41, trying to live a life separate from the Vietnam experience. Rereading these old letters triggers all sorts of things in me. But mostly it leads me to wonder what I would say to that kid now—now that I am old enough to be that kid’s father.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“But what should be noted, because it is so often overlooked, is that most veterans have been able to build on their experiences in Vietnam. Their lives belie the stereotype. For every Vieteran who has had difficulty readjusting, dozens of others have thrived.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“The war hardly seems so long removed. For those still affected by Vietnam, and for those who, as the girlfriend of a veteran wrote to the commission, “were either too young to fully understand what was going on, or old enough to know all too well,”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“My letters are mirrors of what I see,” one GI wrote to his mother. “If you see death in my letter, multiply it 10 times—that’s what I see.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“these writings evoke the war in a way other media do not, offering exuberance and weariness, courage and confusion, bravado and fear.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“How much I’ve relied on getting a note of concern, a phrase that conveys a thought of interest, a word that asks of well-being.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“In Vietnam, the illusion of American military omnipotence was shattered. It was our longest war, costing 58,000 American lives and 300,000 wounded. It succeeded only in leaving a legacy of bitterness and unacknowledged sacrifice.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“Letters from home are like Bibles: they tell tales so distant from this reality that they demand a faith before one can actually believe them.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“The soldier, sailor, pilot, or Marine fights to carry out his orders, to protect his buddies, to kill the enemy before he himself is killed—not to be a hero.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“The portrait that emerges from these letters is of man ennobled through sacrifice, not by unthinking patriotism or some mystical warrior ethic but by walking through hell with people who depend on him, and on whom he depends in return, living for another day when he has to do it again, for such are the orders of the country he loves.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“It does not often yield to simplistic notions of strength or weakness, bravery or faint-heartedness, heroism or cowardice.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam

“For many, service in war deepens love of country and commitment to the principles that bind them to it. Yet war does not inspire bluster or bravado.”
― Bernard Edelman, Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam