#vietnam

Communications are better now than in my Vietnam days. ↗

— R. Lee Ermey

#better now #communications #days #now #than

I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant. ↗

— J. William Fulbright

#any #bangkok #completely #did #ever

Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam. ↗

— Tom Hayden

#fonda #neither #nor #north #north vietnam

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam. ↗

— Michael Ignatieff

#defeat #direct #direct experience #draft #end

After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate. ↗

— Nguyen Cao Ky

#along #america #devices #drifting #fate

My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age. ↗

— Curtis LeMay

#aggression #bomb #communists #drawn #frankly

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

#death #friendship #spirituality #vietnam-war #age

Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war. ↗

— John Pilger

#laboratory #much #vietnam #war

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

#music #vietnam-war #death

If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't. They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live. He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth. ↗

— Dalton Trumbo

#soldier #vietnam #war #death