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Vietnam & Vietnam War
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  Vaccine & Vaccination  ·  Vacuum  ·  Valour & Valor  ·  Value  ·  Vampire  ·  Vanity  ·  Variety  ·  Vatican & Vatican City  ·  Vegetables  ·  Vegetarian & Vegan  ·  Venezuela & Venezuelans  ·  Venice  ·  Venus  ·  Vexation & Vexed  ·  Vice  ·  Vice-President  ·  Victim  ·  Victoria, Queen  ·  Victory  ·  Video  ·  Vienna  ·  Vietnam & Vietnam War  ·  Vikings  ·  Village  ·  Villain  ·  Violence & Violent  ·  Virgin & Virginity  ·  Virginia  ·  Virtue  ·  Virus  ·  Vision (Dream)  ·  Vision (Sight)  ·  Vitamins  ·  Voice  ·  Volcano  ·  Voodoo  ·  Vortex & Vortices  ·  Vote & Voter  ·  Vow  ·  Vulcan  

★ Vietnam & Vietnam War

Were going in there and were killing South Vietnamese, were killing children, were killing women, were killing innocent people because we dont want to have the war fought on American soil.  Or because they are 12,000 miles away and they might get to be 11,000 miles away.  I very seriously question whether we have that right.  Those of us who stay here in the United States we must feel it when we use napalm and villages are destroyed and civilians are killed – this is also our responsibility.  Robert Kennedy

 

 

Do we have the right here in the United States to say that we’re going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people as we have refugees?  Robert Kennedy, Face the Nation, 1967

 

 

We dropped more bombs on North Vietnam and South Vietnam than we dropped on Germany during the whole Second World War.  What else can you bomb?  Who else can you kill?  Robert Kennedy  

 

 

But still theyre a bloody good bunch of killers.  Colonel George S Patton III

 

 

I am heartily in favour of Americas involvement in Vietnam.  Ive said so time and time again.  Robert Gordon Menzies, former Australian PM

 

 

70,000,000 litres of chemical weapons of mass destruction were sprayed over the Vietnamese people, their water and their countryside.  The most lethal was Agent Orange which defoliated, killed and contaminated everything in its path like a radioactive atomic bomb.  To this day survivors suffer related cancers, genetic deformities and permanent environmental damage.  Ring of Power, 2008

 

Korea and Vietnam were torn up like rags into half-communist half-capitalist countries.  And became the playing field for phoney war games between the bankster super-powers.  The lives of 4,000,000 Korean civilians and 33,000 American soldiers were sacrificed in the Korean war.  ibid.

 

 

If you asked an American student, How many people died in Vietnam? youd get fifty-eight thousand  Because theyve dismissed the two, three, maybe four million Vietnamese who were killed by the United States and its allies in that war.   Denis Halliday, UN Assistant Secretary General

 

 

I have never gotten even the courtesy of a reply or a return phone call.  Total absolute silence.   Bob Muller, Vietnam Veterans of America Association, interview John Pilger

 

 

When we used to petition for health care under GI Bill for Employment Programs they would cry poverty.  Theyd say it was fiscally irresponsible.  Bob Muller 

 

 

Ive been through the anger, Ive been through the rage and the sorrow and the depression and the alienation and everything – Im just bitter right now.  Vietnam veteran, interview John Pilger   

 

 

Hello, Mum.  Well the shit has really started here.  Ive been in combat two months now, almost since the day I got here.  Im so confused about it; all I think some days is Im going crazy.  These people – the Gooks – hate me; hate all us.  So why am I almost dying for them?  All the guys who are putting themselves on the line are Grunts like me.  We dont think this war is worth dying for.  We dont think the Lifers who wont fight are worth dying for.  Weve talked this out and weve decided to tell the company commander were not walking into that bush again.  At least well go to jail where its safe.  Kenneth (Grunt), letter to mother, shortly before being killed in action

 

 

There was no brass band waiting on you.  Nothing.  You weren’t a hero.  You lost the war.  Sergeant Mike Troyer

 

 

The Americans will not win the war in the South by bombing the North.  They will never win this war.  We will never submit.  Ho Chi Minh, president North Vietnam, interview French television

 

 

We snuck back to examine the battlefield.  I thought, Holy Fuck!  Did we kill them all?   What we saw made us shudder.  Because we saw how small we were compared to them.  As small as one of their thighs.  I never understood why the Americans came to our country.  Nguyen Van Lem

 

 

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.  Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

 

 

North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States.  Only Americans can do that.  Richard Nixon, 1969

 

 

Throughout the war in Vietnam the United States has exercised a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war.  Richard Nixon  

 

 

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War.  It was misreported then and it is misreported now.  Richard Nixon

 

 

As a result of what we have done in South Vietnam, not only has the psychology changed there, but also it has had a most beneficial effect in my opinion among other free nation countries who look to South Vietnam as a test.  Richard Nixon

 

 

Throughout the years of negotiations we have insisted on peace with honor.  Let us be proud of the young Americans who served with honor and distinction.  Richard Nixon

 

 

As this long and difficult war ends I would like to address a few special words to the American people.  Your steadfastness is supporting our insistence of peace with honor had made peace with honor possible.  Richard Nixon

 

 

For once weve got to use the maximum power of this country against this shit-ass little country.  To Win.  The War.  Richard Nixon, the Nixon tapes

 

 

Henry, you dont have any idea ... Youre so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I dont give a damn.  I dont care.  Richard Nixon, the Nixon tapes  

 

 

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now.  Will that drown people?

 

Kissinger: That would drown about 200,000 people.

 

Nixon: Well no no no I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.

 

Kissinger: That I think would just be too much.

 

Nixon: The nuclear bomb?  Does that bother you?  Nixon tapes 25th April 1972

 

 

South Vietnam probably can never survive anyway.  Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words, Sky Atlantic 2018

 

 

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles.  What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural.  And that is why we didnt make it.  Henry Kissinger

 

 

No foreign policy – no matter how ingenious – has any chance of success if born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.  Henry Kissinger

 

 

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.  We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.  In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.  The conventional army loses if it does not win.  The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape – to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.  Henry Kissinger, Foreign Affairs 48:2 1969 

 

 

In public Nixon renewed his campaign pledge to bring an honourable end to the war.  In private the President shared Kissinger’s view that the best peace would be achieved by force.  The Trials of Henry Kissinger, 2002

 

 

Madman tactics failed to end the war as Nixon hoped.  In fact his saturation bombing provoked a backlash at home fuelling mounting public protest and criticism.  David Reynolds, Nixon in the Den, BBC 2015

 

The President was exhausted and drinking heavily.  In May 1970 four students were shot dead on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio protesting for peace.  The following weekend thousands of anti-war demonstrators converged on Washington.  Nixon felt besieged.  ibid.

 

Nixon suddenly flipped.  Desperate to break out of the Den he summoned his driver.  He drove down to the Lincoln Memorial.  There in the early light he confronted some of the protesters.  They were utterly astonished to encounter the President.  And to hear rambling recollections of his own idealism at their age.  ibid.

 

Nixon had extricated America from the mess, and got the boys home.  ibid.

 

 

On a campus in Wisconsin an antiwar demonstration spiralled out of control, marking the first time that a student protest had turned violent.  Storyville: How Vietnam Was Lost, BBC 2005; viz also David Maraniss, They Marched into Sunlight

 

[William H] Sewell [Chancellor of the Faculty] was an opponent of the Vietnam War.  He voted against allowing Dow to recruit on campus but he was outvoted.  ibid.  [Dow manufactured Napalm; Sewell later summoned rozzers]

 

 

I had a dream, Ronnie.  The other night.  And you were speaking to a large crowd just like him [Kennedy].  Just like him.  And you were saying great things.  Born on the Fourth of July 1989 starring Tom Cruise & Willem Dafoe & Kyra Sedgwick & Raymond J Barry & Jerry Levine & Frank Whaley & Caroline Kava & Cordelia Gonzalez & Ed Lauter & John Getz & Michael Wincott & Edith Diaz & Bob Gunton et al, director Oliver Stone, mother 

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