#viet

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

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

#governance #iraq-war #lyndon-b-johnson #politics #united-states

He was a commander in the Russian army at a time when the Russians were our enemies and still part of the Soviet Union . This wasn't very long ago, Alex.The collapse of communism. It was only in 1989 that the Berlin Wall came down." She stopped. "I suppose none of this means very much to you." "Well, it wouldn't," Alex said. "I was only two years old. ↗

— Anthony Horowitz

#berlin-wall #communism #soviet-union #communism

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#america #bombs #communism #communists #vietnam

It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer. It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#politics #revolution #russia #soviet-union #communism

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. ↗

— William Westmoreland

#censorship #confused #ever #first #fought

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then. ↗

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

#after #agreement #because #born #childhood

Look at the Afghans, during the time of the Soviet invasion. They were among the poorest Muslims in the world, yet they were sustained by their faith in God, and God alone. ↗

— Abu Bakar Bashir

#alone #among #during #faith #god