Vietnam War
172 quotes
Biography
"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years."
"When I was a serving soldier, very much accepting the framework of the Cold War as the proper lens to examine and think about international politics, it was possible to conclude that the Vietnam War was necessary."
"In the Seattle airport, as I was arriving home after serving in Vietnam in 1968-1969, a gang of 10 to 20 strangers clustered in the terminal and shouted insults at me as I passed by in my uniform. At the time, I paid them little attention. I was swept up in living, at long last, the dream that had sustained me through the hell of war: I was coming home. I was touching U.S. soil for the first time. Besides, I simply could not appreciate the magnitude of what they were doing at the time. It never occurred to me that people could be so morally bankrupt that, devoid of any fortitude, they would substitute the safety of another's company and, together, attack individual young soldiers, who walked through the airport alone in the sacred moment of homecoming. The longer I was home, however, the more clearly I understood that my Seattle experience was no curious aberration. This was part of an organized effort by a large and vocal segment of our society to ridicule and demean traditional values and strength of character by ridiculing and demeaning those who believed in them."
"There is a dangerous myth: That people like my persecutors in Seattle were just as courageous for resisting duty as the men who put their lives on the line. "Bring the boys home?" All I heard was, "Hell, no, we won't go." Why did all this supposedly courageous commitment to peace evaporate once the threat of being drafted was removed? Torture and wholesale massacre in Vietnam and Cambodia increased exponentially when the U.S. pulled out. Why were there no protests then? The answer, of course, is that commitment to peace was never the issue. Resisting service was. Figuratively, I have been "spat upon" countless times over the years, but not by hippies in airports. I am spat upon every time one of my countrymen prostitutes his values to perpetuate the myth that the easy, comfortable way out of a difficult time for our country was as "courageous" as making hard choices."
"We changed planes in Denver and noticed that the general public was avoiding us. No thanks, no welcome home or anything, just stares and dirty looks. We didn't care; we were home. Our emotions were numb. We landed at the old downtown airport in Kansas City and put our duffle bags in storage lockers. They actually had those at airports back then. We got a taxi to Liberty, Missouri, but didn't have enough money between us to get all the way home to Excelsior. Didn't matter. We figured we could hitchhike. After all, we were in our Army uniforms, and figured someone would stop and offer us a ride. We were wrong. Cars went past honking and giving us one-finger salutes, one ran off the shoulder at us and made us dodge aside. Still, we didn't care, we were home."
"I kept thinking things had changed since I left. My sister Debbie had gotten married. Many high school friends were away at college. I contacted them but they were still young, they didn't understand that I had changed. Some of the same people were still sitting on cars downtown and talking about things that really didn't matter to me anymore. It wasn't them that had changed; it was me. The transition from a war zone to Middle America was not easy. Still, I had that "1000-yard stare," loud noises made me jump, helicopters woke me up when they flew over the house, and I felt ten years older. Many others had a much harder time in Vietnam than I had. The Grunts, the wounded, the guys that didn't make it home. We each had our own war. But we did what our country asked of us."
"One more issue we had to deal with upon our return was our language. Over there, everything was fuck this, fuck that, fucking morning, fucking boots, fucking mud, fucking war. It was embedded in our language and it's how we talked; but it wasn't acceptable back in "The World." I remember the family got together after I returned. Most of my relatives were there; they were all visiting. I couldn't think of too much to say until my sister's cat jumped up on my lap. I don't like cats too much, and it dug its claws into my groin. I immediately yelled, "Fucking cat!" and knocked it across the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I knew then I would have to make some changes now that I was home. My sister laughed and said I impressed her with my control. She figured I would have just grabbed the cat and killed it. I heard of one Vet who had a similar experience. Everyone asked him why he was so quiet. Finally, he said, "I would have said something, but I was afraid I would fuck up.""
"If we go down that road we might have, within five years, 300,000 men in the rice paddies of the jungles of Viet-Nam and never be able to find them."
"I used to be a left-wing, antiestablishment, protest-oriented, march-on-Washington type of individual. Once, back in college, I participated in a hunger strike to end the Vietnam War. By not eating, I was supposedly enabling myself to focus my consciousness on peace. What actually happened was that I became absolutely obsessed with cheeseburgers, although if I really, really forced myself to concentrate on the tragedy in Southeast Asia, I could also visualize french fries. I kept this up for several days, but failed to have much of an impact on Washington. At no point, so far as I know, did a White House aide burst into the Oval Office and shout with alarm, "Some students at Haverford College have been refusing to eat for several days! followed by Lyndon Johnson saying, "Mah God! Ah got to change mah foreign policy!""
"1973- This was the year that the war finally ended. Nixon called it "peace with honor," although he surely knew that the Communists would take over, just the same as if we had never gotten involved over there in the first place- except of course for the hundreds of thousands of people who got hurt or killed. So you tell me why the whole thing was not a terrible, criminal waste. You tell me why Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, instead of being required- along with all the other "leaders" who kept sending Americans over there long after they knew the war was pointless- to get down on his knees and beg the forgiveness of the American veterans, and their families, and the Vietnamese people. Everybody knew that "peace with honor" was bullshit, but nobody cared at that point. Everybody just wanted it to be over. When it finally was, there was no joy, only relief."
"A few years ago I got into a heated argument with the 18-year-old son of a friend of mine. Actually, it wasn't so much an argument as it was me getting angry at him for something he said. What he said, basically, was that he wished there was a war like Vietnam going on right then, so that the members of his generation would have something big, something exciting, in their lives. I told him that this was a reprehensible thing to say; I told him he should not want people to die to keep his generation amused. But in retrospect- although I obviously don't want another Vietnam- I see what he meant. He didn't want people to die; he wanted there to be something to give his life significance, something to mark his formative era that would be more meaningful than whatever TV sitcoms were popular at the time. We Boomers had that; we had a lot going on, maybe too much."
"We cannot remain silent on Viet Nam. We should remember that whatever victory there may be possible, it will have a racial stigma…. It will always be the case of a predominantly white power killing an Asian nation. We are interested in peace, not just for Christians but for the whole of humanity."
"The limits of the centralizing cybernetic model became clear in Vietnam, although its large role in the US defeat has often been disregarded. James Gibson has perhaps done the most to document the dramatic failure of ‘technowar’, ‘a production system that can be rationally managed and warfare as a kind of activity that can be scientifically determined by constructing computer models’. The principles of OR and SA were applied to provide analysis of the conflict and guidance to the policy makers while cybernetic command-and-control technologies were widely deployed. What developed in Vietnam can be appropriately described as an ‘information pathology’, an obsession with statistical evaluations and directing the war from the top, perceived as the point of omniscience, when in practice soldiers on the ground often understood far better than their superiors how badly the war was going."
"Between 1967 and 1972, the Air Force ran Operation Igloo White at the cost of nearly $1 billion a year. Through an array of sensors designed to record sound, heat, vibrations, and even the smell of urine, feeding information to a control centre in Thailand which sent on the resulting targeting information to patrolling jet aircraft (even the release of bombs could be controlled remotely), this vast cybernetic mechanism was designed to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and trails providing logistical support to the North Vietnamese. At the time, extravagant claims were made about the performance of the system with the reported number of destroyed trucks in 1970 exceeding the total number of trucks believed to be in all of North Vietnam. In reality, far fewer truck remains were ever identified, there were probably many false positives in target identification, and the North Vietnamese and their Laotian allies became adept at fooling the sensors. In spite of all this, the official statistics still trumpeted a 90 per cent success rate in destroying equipment traveling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an assertion difficult to sustain given that the North Vietnamese conducted major tank and artillery operations in South Vietnam in 1972. Edwards incisively observes that ‘Operation Igloo White’s centralized, computerized,automated, power-at-a-distance method of “interdiction” resembled a microcosmic version of the whole US approach to Vietnam’."
"Those of us who served in Vietnam are now 70 years old, give or take... we've all grown a bit gray-haired and fat over the years, and probably look like cuddly Grandpas and Grandmas now. Trust me, that wasn't how we looked back then. And unlike any previous American war, when we came "marching home," we were reviled, insulted, spat upon, had blood thrown on us in airports, or simply avoided and ignored. Those were not isolated incidents, and they left scares every bit as real and painful as an AK-47 or an RPG, the famous Russian- and Chinese-made Rocket-Propelled Grenade. When we got home, no one wanted to hear about the war, and we quickly learned not to bring it up. We were the embarrassing "800-pound gorilla" in the room that everyone wished would fade away; so that's what we did. For many vets we interviewed, I am the first person they've spoken to about the war since they came home, including their wives and children. Neither the American Legion nor the VFW wanted us around, much less as members. So, we formed our own veterans' groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America, the Band of Brothers, and many others. They brought us together and have given us a new sense of pride, as you can see from the Vietnam Veteran baseball caps many now wear."
"Over 9 million of us served on active duty during the war; 2,710,000, or about one third served in Vietnam; 211,454 were wounded, and 58,220 were killed. Unfortunately, that last number does not include the tens of thousands who have died because of the indiscriminate spraying of Agent Orange, or had their lives dramatically shortened because of the myriad of diseases it causes. They are part of a growing list of names that are NOT engraved on the wall in Washington. My estimate, which is by no means scientific, is that well over 50% of surviving Vietnam veterans now suffer from PTSD or one of the many Agent Orange-related illnesses such as Type II Diabetes, Neuropathy, Heart Disease, Parkinson's, Prostate Cancer, Hodgkin's Disease, and other types of cancers. Most of these diseases struck as we reached 60 years of age, like so many ticking bombs. As someone said, "Vietnam- it's the gift that keeps on giving. If they didn't kill us over there, they're determined to kill us over here.""
"The irony is that we who served were patriotic then and, if anything, we are even more patriotic now. Still, I don't believe there was a single vet I interviewed who doesn't think the war was a monstrous mistake and that we were sold down the river by a long series of US Presidents and Washington politicians, few of whom ever served, fewer still let their own children serve, and none ever studied the history of the people and country where they chose to send us to bleed and die, because they were afraid to admit a mistake."
"You sense a strong sense of mission among the fighting men in Viet Nam, an enormous compassion for all victims of Communist atrocities, especially the children, and a religious conviction that surely must resemble the "faith of our fathers." On Christmas Eve, we traditionally closed our show with my leading the cast and troops in singing "Silent Night." Afterwards, I'd cry my eyes out. There in Viet Nam, in the muddy, battle-scarred camps where we played to jam-packed audiences, "Silent Night" became one of the most poignant and meaningful songs I ever delivered to any audience. I can close my eyes now and see some of those faces. Always, as I looked at them through a blur of tears, I wondered how many of them would never see another Christmas."
"The Road to Viet Nam, and to the other important places Mr. Hope visits at Christmas, had to end for Bob and me after the 1966 trip. That year Bobby and Gloria became old enough to understand that Daddy and Mommie were gone quite a few days. They cried for us a lot, Farmor and Farfar said, and really seemed to suffer from our absence. "Anita, I think it's time we decide to spend Christmas at home," Bob said gently. We were quiet for a bit, remembering this and that: Christmas Eve in a Saigon hotel room, where we spread our pictures out on the bed and reminisced about home... the U.S. Army major who had thanked us for coming to Viet nam at Christmas, saying, "I know how it is to leave your children, ma'am. I have five kids of my own"... the young sergeant we met in a mess hall in Cu Chi, who proudly showed us pictures of his firstborn son, whom he'd never seen... the years in the eyes of those rugged Green Beret guys as they joined me in singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah"... Billy Graham's Christmas message to the troops from the Book of John, Chapter 3, vers 16: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.""
"By Thanksgiving, 1967, we still had not made any really final decision about whether or not we'd return for another tour of Viet Nam. Bob and I thought back to the previous Thanksgiving, when I sang for troops at Ford Leonard Wood, Missouri, America's largest training post. Many of the men in that audience were in Viet Nam by now, I knew."
"We thought, We will go to Vietnam and be Audie Murphies. Kick in the door, run in the hooch, give it a good burst- kill. And get a big kill ratio in Vietnam. Get a big kill count. One thing at OCS was nobody said, "Now, there will be innocent civilians there." Oh sure, there will in Saigon. In the secure areas, the Vietnamese may be clapping the way the French in the '44 newsreels do, "Yay for America!" But we would be somewhere else: be in VC country. It was drummed into us, "Be sharp! Be on guard! As soon as you think these people won't kill you, ZAP! In combat you haven't friends! You have enemies!" Over and over at OCS we heard this, and I told myself, I'll act as if I'm never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone's bad."
"Now then, the question is, How can we move to begin to change what's going on in this country. I maintain, as we have in SNCC, that the war in Vietnam is an illegal and immoral war. And the question is, What can we do to stop that war? What can we do to stop the people who, in the name of our country, are killing babies, women, and children? What can we do to stop that? And I maintain that we do not have the power in our hands to change that institution, to begin to recreate it, so that they learn to leave the Vietnamese people alone, and that the only power we have is the power to say, "Hell no!" to the draft. We have to say -- We have to say to ourselves that there is a higher law than the law of a racist named McNamara. There is a higher law than the law of a fool named Rusk. And there's a higher law than the law of a buffoon named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. It's the law of each of us. It is the law of each of us saying that we will not allow them to make us hired killers. We will stand pat. We will not kill anybody that they say kill. And if we decide to kill, we're going to decide who we going to kill. And this country will only be able to stop the war in Vietnam when the young men who are made to fight it begin to say, "Hell, no, we ain’t going.""
"There were only two types of people when I came home- those who were against what we did and those who said nothing. I spent the next 17 years saying nothing. I had no one to talk to."
"Because my hair was fairly short, I was easily picked out as a GI, even when I was in civilian clothes. The taunts hurt. I heard them on the West Coast and on the East Coast when I returned there. Couple this with running into a right-wing ideologue from my high school class at a bar one night, with him ranting about how he supports the war and why we should bomb the "gooks" into oblivion, but not listening to me relate that the farmers caught in the middle of the war, the ones who suffered the most, didn't have an interest in the ideological conflict. Hell, it was pretty complex. Pretty sad. No wonder I went into a shell for years."
"To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could."