#viet

When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one. ↗

— Leonard P. Matlovich

#equality #gay #military #vietnam #equality

Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way--insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders. ↗

— Andrew X. Pham

#motorcycles #saigon #traffic #vietnam #equality

You remember all those phrases about how "these people" - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese. ↗

— Neil Sheehan

#any #around #asians #certainly #children

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

#vietnam-war #freedom

...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#darkness-at-noon #liberty #politics #soviet-union #freedom

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

#death #friendship #vietnam-war #age

Yes, Samantha, we in the Soviet Union are trying to do everything so that there will not be war on Earth. This is what every Soviet man wants. ↗

— Yuri Andropov

#every #everything #man #soviet #soviet union

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#vietnam #war #life

I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl! ↗

— Thanhha Lai

#insideoutandbackagain #life #love #refugees #saigon

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

#war #justice