After the 1954 Geneva international conference, Vietnam was divided into two parts. On paper, North and South Vietnam were twin countries born at the same moment.
But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that’s when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.
I would not trade you a billion dollars for the kids I led to combat in Vietnam or in fact any of the Marines that I served with for a quarter of a century.
In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison – they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.
No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time – the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.
Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East.
By the mid-sixties, the United States had poured more than half a million troops into South Vietnam.
It’s a weird scene. You win a few baseball games and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by reporters and TV men with cameras asking you about Vietnam and race relations.
What some people argue is that Vietnam stands for the proposition that there’s no role for American power anywhere on earth. I don’t believe that’s the case at all. I think we’re the strongest force for democracy and for stability on earth, and we must have a strong capacity to perform that role.
My brother-in-law, Chuck, whom I have known since we were teenagers, is a disabled veteran who was wounded while fighting with the marines in Vietnam. I’ve been around to observe how the war affected his life and the problems that veterans have, and I knew for a long time that I wanted to write a song about Vietnam.
The reason I’m not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam – and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.
One of the greatest injustices of the Vietnam era is the way our veterans were treated when they returned home. This compounded the pain experienced by those who served. That is a mistake we must never make again.
The Vietnam War was causing people to get drafted; I had received a deferment to finish my undergraduate education, and in order to continue to get a deferment, you had to go to graduate school.
Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.
I’ve always been interested in Vietnam, feel it’s a seminal event in our nation’s history, and have explored it over the years – but I hadn’t been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn’t know if I could add anything new to the discussion.
My ultimate getaway is Vietnam. It has a little bit of everything when it comes to culture, amazing food, beautiful people, exotic sights, sounds and profound history of love, bravery and resilience.
Historically, Vietnam movies have been profitable. All of them. ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘The Deer Hunter.’ You’re looking at movies that have been not pretty successful, but very successful. The foreign numbers have been extraordinary.
I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.
In the late ’60s, Senator Charles E. Goodell, Republican of New York, spoke out against the Vietnam War, bringing on the wrath of the Nixon administration and, as it turned out, the disaffection of conservative voters.
Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria.
Don’t underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn’t shut you down from the moment.
In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over – if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua – that even in conditions of peace they don’t seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human suffering is enormous.
I think Americans understand that in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq and Vietnam, we are fighting an enemy allied with the people who attacked us on 9/11.
Under Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal governments in the 1970s, large numbers of refugees fleeing Vietnam in wretched boats were taken in without any great fuss.
Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.
We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.
I’m happy that I’m alive. I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I’m sure that later on I’ll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive.
Because our homeland and very survival are once more at stake, the American people can’t afford to treat this new war against terrorism like they did Vietnam.
One of the extraordinary features of the Blair government has been its slavish support for the central tenets of Bush’s foreign policy – above all, the war in Iraq. During the Cold War, the Wilson government resisted the suggestion that it should send troops to Vietnam.
I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there.
Laos is considered by many as the dark horse of Southeast Asian cuisine, a culmination of the rich food heritage of neighbouring countries China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.
I look and there’s our boy from Vietnam and our daughter from Ethiopia, and our girl was born in Namibia, and our son is from Cambodia, and they’re brothers and sisters, man. They’re brothers and sisters and it’s a sight for elation.
If John Kerry had a dollar for every time he bragged about serving in Vietnam – oh wait, he does.
The consequences of President Johnson’s campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself.
When I first got back from the war, I said, ‘I’m gonna write the Great American Novel about the Vietnam War.’ So I sat down and wrote 1,700 pages of sheer psychotherapy drivel. It was first person, and there would be pages about wet socks and cold feet.
There’s no service ribbon for people who fought in Korea. We lost over 30,000 men between 1951 and 1953 – as many as we lost in 15 years in Vietnam.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.
During the Cold War, America undertook serious military cuts only once: after the election of Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War. The result: Vietnam fell to the Communists, the Russians moved into Afghanistan, and American influence around the globe waned dramatically.
My dad was a fighter pilot with the 210th Combat Aviation in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War soured President Johnson’s legacy. We still have to recognize his domestic legacy.
Anyway, in 1966, Daddy had started to attack Lyndon Johnson on the war in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson was a good man. Even though he was a Southern conservative, Lyndon Johnson passed more civil-rights legislation than any other president in history.
In Vietnam, we took a hill and defeated the enemy; then we retreated and let the enemy take over.
The Vietnam War was a great tragedy for our country. And it is now far enough away so that one can study without using the slogans to see what’s really happened.
When I was about 21 and just about to get out of college at NYU, Vietnam was raging, and I was a frustrated musician for a little bit.
