Best 115 quotes in «vietnam quotes» category

This - not any particular piece of Vietnamese culture - is my inheritance: the inexplicable need ad extraordinary ability to run when the shit hits the fan. My refugee reflex.

When I crawled down the rabbit hole into the pivotal event of my life--indeed the pivotal event of my generation--to write "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" I never expected it to be such an emotional journey into a life I left four decades ago.

To where? We don't know. To do what? We don't know either. No one tells us anything. We just follow orders.

Well, good luck,’ the Vietnam verbal tic...It was as though people couldn’t stop themselves from saying it, even when they actually meant to express the opposite wish, like, ‘Die, motherfucker.’ Usually it was only an uninhabited passage of dead language, sometimes it came out five times in a sentence, like punctuation, often it was spoken flat side up to telegraph the belief that there wasn’t any way out; tough shit, sin loi, smack it, good luck. Sometimes, though, it was said with such feeling and tenderness that it could crack your mask, that much love where there was so much war. Me too, every day, compulsively, good luck: to friends in the press corps going out on operations, to grunts I’d meet at firebases and airstrips, to the wounded, the dead and all the Vietnamese I ever saw getting fucked over by us and each other, less often but most passionately to myself, and though I meant it every time I said it, it was meaningless. It was like telling someone going out in a storm not to get any on him, it was the same as saying, ‘Gee, I hope you don’t get killed or wounded or see anything that drives you insane.’ You could make all the ritual moves, carry your lucky piece, wear your magic jungle hat, kiss your thumb knuckle smooth as stones under running water, the Inscrutable Immutable was still out there, and you kept on or not at its pitiless discretion. All you could say that wasn’t fundamentally lame was something like, ‘He who bites it this day is safe from the next,’ and that was exactly what nobody wanted to hear.

We obviously don’t live in a perfect world. If we did, then my dad would never have volunteered for Vietnam so he could use the GI Bill to pay for college, Uncle Google would have more important things to do than searching for eight hundred million reasons why our schools suck, and I wouldn’t be at an education leadership conference in Jakarta because there’d be no need for it … right?

Why did this [Vietnam] war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system.

After four or five different wars, I grew weary of that work, partly because in an open war, open to coverage, as Vietnam was, it's not that difficult, really.

As for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and uncivil disobedients among the young, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam.

As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.

Canada used to be...one of our most...most loyal friends, and vice versa. I mean, Canada sent troops to Vietnam. Was Vietnam less containable and more of a threat than Saddam Hussein?

Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam. He said he had a medical problem. He got a medical deferment. Now his doctor says he's the healthiest man alive.

Freedom-loving people around the world must say . . . I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.

Yea though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil...because I am the meanest motherfucker in the Valley.

Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.

By that time [1966], we did begin to get some protests [against Vietnam War]. But not from liberal intellectuals; they never opposed the war.

Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

I deeply regret having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam. For this and any other distortions about my personal life, I want to apologize to my family, friends, colleagues and students. Beyond that circle, however, I shall have no further comment.

I like automatic weapons. I fought for my right to use them in Vietnam.

If John Kerry had a dollar for every time he bragged about serving in Vietnam - oh wait, he does.

If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.

I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war.

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.

In a way I almost feel like the election of Donald Trump has inspired Democrats and progressives and punk rockers in a way that hasn't been seen since Vietnam.

I have a few memories of being young here in the United States, but almost no recollections of being young in Vietnam.

I think Operation Smile is in more than 22 countries, mostly Third World. It just happened that my schedule opened up at the time they were heading to Vietnam.

In the longer term, I hope that as Vietnam evolves into a more prosperous society with active ties to the international marketplace, it will lose its inherent suspicion of the outside world and begin to develop along the lines of what has recently been happening in Thailand and Malaysia.

In the '60s we fought for peace, when the Vietnam war was on. We were against the cops and against the politicians, and there was a lot of waving banners and all that. And I think in a way, just as they were enjoying that machoism of war, we were enjoying the machismo of being anti-war, you know?

Iraq was a war of choice, like Vietnam.

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.

Latin American countries are part of the West and that it is reasonable to expect a certain degree of openness in their societies that we do not demand of, say, China or Vietnam.

[Madame Nhu was] the Sandra Dee of South Vietnam. If I were cast on a desert island with her, I would quickly make friends with the natives.

It is a fact that the Left routinely resists, then as now: Americans fought and died in Vietnam for freedom, just as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Whatever mistakes generals and policymakers have made along the way cannot detract from that essential truth - which should be a part of any reliable history.

I want to make sure that the Coast Guard people in Vietnam know that I am hearing about them often and that I am pleased with what I hear.

My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power - not with ground forces.

One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

There was a time when liberalism was identified with anti-Communism. But the Vietnam War led liberals into the arms of the Left, which had been morally confused about Communism since its inception and had become essentially pacifist following the carnage of World War I.

The truth is that I oppose the Iraq war, just as I opposed the Vietnam War, because these two conflicts have weakened the U.S. and diminished our standing in the world and our national security.

The United States must keep a low profile in Vietnam so we can negotiate its neutralization like we did in Laos .

My opposition to the Vietnam War. I was the first Hollywood actor to speak out against it.

[Robert] Capa: He was a good friend and a great and very brave photographer. It is bad luck for everybody that the percentages caught up with him. It is especially bad for Capa. (On Capa's death in Vietnam, May, 27, 1954)

The Philippines was with the U.S. in the Second World War, in the Korean War, in the Vietnam War, and now in the war against terrorism.

The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.

This nation should be less worried about putting the Vietnam syndrome behind us than restarting the World War II victory syndrome that resulted in the Vietnam syndrome in the first place.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Vietnam, we take over by doing pedicure! That's how we take over. We take over one foot at a time, damn it - that's the plan of attack right there. We take over from the toe up, that's the plan. We spread over USA like fungus from the toe.

The whole thing about whether you smoke marijuana or not is so ridiculous. That and whether you protested the Vietnam War. Give me a break. Especially the marijuana thing.

Vietnam is absolutely breathtaking. I've never been to that part of the world before and it is an area of such natural beauty.

Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.

With all my traveling around the world I would say that South Vietnam was not as corrupted as people want to talk about it because it is a matter of degrees.