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.
We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the ’60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.
I’m a very brave person. I can go to North Vietnam, I can challenge my government, but I can’t challenge the man I’m with if means I’m going to end up alone.
When the soldiers came home from Vietnam, there were no parades, no celebrations. So they built the Vietnam Memorial for themselves.
My grandpa was a World War II paratrooper, my uncle a Vietnam Purple Heart recipient, my cousins both Marine Corps officers. I have some very close Navy SEAL connections as well.
If you look back at a film like ‘Dawn of the Dead’ – You can either watch it as a straight-up genre film and have fun with zombies being shot, or you can look at it as a metaphor for consumerism. Or a metaphor for the Vietnam war.
Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war.
Vietnam was as much a laboratory experiment as a war.
In the early stages of our involvement in Vietnam, basically I felt that our course was right. My concern grew with the concern of the American people.
Because the GIs were sent massively to South Vietnam, maybe it’s a good idea to have a broadcast for them.
My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.
World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.
I greatly blame Congress, spurred on by its personal hatred of Nixon, for passing legislation in June through August of ’73 which embargoed any further U.S. help to South Vietnam.
I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.
It’s not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.
My father was a builder. During my high school years, I worked for him. One summer, I was working with a guy who had just come back from Vietnam and had been a tunnel rat. He wouldn’t talk about the experience, but it sounded really scary to me.
If wars were won by superior technology alone, the United States would not have been vanquished in Vietnam or waylaid in Afghanistan.
I used to say, ‘Mad’ takes on both sides.’ We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. ‘Mad’ was wide open.
My dad was in the Navy; he was in Vietnam. My mom was trying to sell real estate on the side. We didn’t have a lot of money.
In books or films, it is desirable to have a climactic battle scene, but the world does not operate in those gross dramatic terms. In Vietnam, there was a general aimlessness, not just in the physical sense, but beyond that in the moral and ethical sense.
My father was an air officer in the Second World War. My brother was a marine in Vietnam. When I was given this opportunity, I leapt at the chance because I thought it would be a hell of a lot more interesting than what my friends were doing.
Today, war of necessity is used by critics of military action to describe unavoidable response to an attack like that on Pearl Harbor that led to our prompt, official declaration of war, while they characterize as unwise wars of choice the wars in Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq.
Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn’t know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.
Although I wasn’t able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.
The most powerful Vietnam movie, to me, was ‘The Deer Hunter,’ which was more about what happened to the folks who went and about their relationships.
I was in the Army in the 1960s. I didn’t go to Vietnam. I went to Germany, where I drank beer. But I did have an empathy with the soldiers in Vietnam.
In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like ‘Sands of Iwo Jima’ and there was this, you know – after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.
Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It’s time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.
The entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. And they’re dying in vain right this very second. And you know what’s worse than a soldier dying in vain? It’s more soldiers dying in vain. That’s what’s worse.
I didn’t expect to find much visible trace of the American war in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are too hard-bitten to dwell on it, and they’ve sanded away all but the outcroppings of history – the museums, the memorials.
A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.
Think about it: Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, North Korea, the former Soviet Union – they all start with the intention of leveling the playing field – or making things better for the little guy – and instead, they created misery, poverty, destruction and a permanent ruling class of bureaucrats.
For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn’t find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.
What would be most productive is for Chairman Kim and his staff and for President Trump and all his staff to continue upon the path that was laid out for us both in Vietnam and at the DMZ, and that is a diplomatic resolution and the end of North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Majored in staying out of Vietnam.
Cuba never had advisors in Vietnam. The military there knew very well how to conduct their war.
After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party.
Some useful advice for all of my Asian-American brothers and sisters – never go paint-balling with a Vietnam veteran.
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.
I don’t understand it, how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam and cannot send troops to Selma, Alabama, to protect people whose only desire is to register to vote.
Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side by side.
When I was a boy we didn’t wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.
I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 – in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam – that is probably the most important case.
As a little kid in the late 1960s, I was afraid of the world. Even if I didn’t get caught in the draft that was sending American teenagers to Vietnam, there was always the possibility of a Soviet nuclear attack. I made constant escape plans and imagined a life going from port to port.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.
I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.
When I visited Vietnam for Oxfam, the thing that really struck me was how the local farmers had to prepare to evacuate or climb to their mezzanines with their valuable family possessions.
In particular, Kissinger was a key player during a transformative period of the imperial presidency, in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Vietnam War undermined the traditional foundations on which it had stood since the early years of the Cold War: elite planning, bipartisan consensus, and public support.
Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. Think of how Eisenhower came in to stop the Korean War. Think of how Nixon was elected to stop the mess in Vietnam.
I’m not a pacifist. I was very much for the war against Hitler and I also supported the intervention in Korea, but in this war we went in there to steal Vietnam.
Power tends to corrupt. But the power in Washington resides in Congress, if it wants to use it. It can do anything – it can stop the Vietnam War, it can make its will felt, if it can ever get its act together to do anything.
