History of the United States

"America ... goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benign sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."

"If you want to talk of core of the war attacking Syria, they [United States] have been attacking Syria through proxies, they didn't fight ISIS, they didn't take any pressure on Turkey and Saudi Arabia in order to tell them stop sending money and personnel and every logistics support to that terrorist they could have been done so, but they didn't. So, actually they are waging war but in different way..."

"Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or "disappeared", at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame."

"Between 1945 and 2005 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process, the U.S. caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

"There have also been cases where the United States, while (perhaps) not interfering in the election process, was, however, involved in overthrowing a democratically-elected government, such as in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, the Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964, Greece 1967, and Fiji 1987."

"U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century. It has defeated communism and Nazism and has intervened against the Taliban and Serbian ethnic cleansing."

"America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused; preferring greatness to power and justice to glory."

"I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it...I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street ... Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

"Our inhabitants are especially free to promote their own welfare. They are unburdened by militarism. They are not called upon to support any imperialistic designs. Every mother can rest in the assurance that her children will find here a land of devotion, prosperity and peace. The tall shaft near which we are gathered and yonder stately memorial remind us that our standards of manhood are revealed in the adoration which we pay to Washington and Lincoln. They are unrivaled and unsurpassed. Above all else, they are Americans."

"The American forces are distinctly the forces of peace. They are the guaranties of that order and tranquility in this part of the world, which is alike beneficial to us and all the other nations. Everyone knows that we covet no territory, we entertain no imperialistic designs, we harbor no enmity toward any other people. We seek no revenge, we nurse no grievances, we have inflicted no injuries, and we fear no enemies. Our ways are the ways of peace."

"It used to be that only the critics of American foreign policy referred to the American empire ... In the past three or four years [2001–2004], however, a growing number of commentators have begun to use the term American empire less pejoratively, if still ambivalently, and in some cases with genuine enthusiasm."

"What is not allowed is to say that the United States is an empire and that this might not be wholly bad."

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

"The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard - every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve."

"It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril."

"U.S. historians have generally considered the late 19th century imperialist urge as an aberration in an otherwise smooth democratic trajectory ... Yet a century later, as the U.S. empire engages in a new period of global expansion, Rome is once more a distant but essential mirror for American elites ... Now, with military mobilisation on an exceptional scale after September 2001, the United States is openly affirming and parading its imperial power. For the first time since the 1890s, the naked display of force is backed by explicitly imperialist discourse."

"Riley Freeman: “No stealing”? Don’t you always say theft in America is justified because the whole country is stolen land?"

"The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were."

"Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars."

"Our decaying empire stumbles forward like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, crippled by arrogance and incompetence, torching the rule of law and fantasizing that indiscriminate industrial violence will regain a lost hegemony. Able to project devastating military force, its initial success leads inevitably to self-defeating and costly quagmires. The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it."

"These anxieties prepared the way for a conservative revival based on family, faith and flag that enabled the neo-conservatives to transform conservative patriotism into assertive nationalism after 9/11. In the short term, the invasion of Iraq was a manifestation of national unity. Placed in a longer perspective, it reveals a growing divergence between new globalised interests, which rely on cross-border negotiation, and insular nationalist interests, which seek to rebuild fortress America."

"Let us look facts straight in the eye. World imperialism headed by its aggressive detachment, U.S. imperialism, is directing the course of its economy towards preparations for war. It is arming itself to the teeth. U.S. imperialism is rearming Bonn's Germany, Japan, and all its allies and satellites with all kinds of weapons. It has set up and perfected aggressive military organizations, it has established and continues to establish military bases all around the socialist camp. It is accumulating stocks of nuclear weapons and refuses to disarm, to stop testing nuclear weapons, and is feverishly engaged in inventing new means of mass extermination. Why is it doing all this? To go to a wedding party? No, to go to war against us, to do away with socialism and communism, to put the peoples under bondage."

"It’s a tectonic shift [the decline of an empire and the rise of another one]. Let’s look at this from Russia’s point of view. This is everything that Russia has been aiming at and insisting upon for the last five years. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have been leading the understanding that the world needs to be de-dollarized, that the United States has declared an economic war against Russia, China and their allies, really against Eurasia. So, in effect, by drawing the sanctions — not only the sanctions — but the most important thing is by seizing Russia’s foreign holdings in the United States, its treasury bond holdings and the bank deposits. What the United States has done itself is exactly what both Lavrov and President Xi of China have been saying the world must move towards. They’ve been saying we must have a multinational world, multipolar world. We must be de-dollarized. We must cut free of the dollar and isolate, protect ourselves from the United States’ ability to use sanctions, to interrupt our economic activity, to use oil to threaten any country that doesn’t follow U.S. policy from having their energy reserves cut off, to protect countries that don’t produce their own food from being able to buy food and feed themselves... So everybody thought for the last five years: How will Russia and China and their allies, India, Iran, create this new world order? Well, the United States... has destroyed itself."

"So they get it, the game is over. And it’s not over because Russia and China and India and Iran defeated America. It was the self-defeating policies of this blindly arrogant, greedy, Republican, Democratic, deep state philosophy."

"This is a huge nation dominated by the most reactionary and violent ruling class in the history of the world, where the majority of the people just simply cannot understand that they are existing on the misery and discomfort of the world."

"At an alliance-level analysis, case studies of South Korea and Japan show that the necessity of the alliance relationship with the U.S. and their relative capabilities to achieve security purposes lead them to increase the size of direct economic investment to support the U.S. forces stationed in their territories, as well as to facilitate the US global defense posture. In addition, these two countries have increased their political and economic contribution to the U.S.-led military operations beyond the geographic scope of the alliance in the post-Cold War period ... Behavioral changes among the U.S. allies in response to demands for sharing alliance burdens directly indicate the changed nature of unipolar alliances. In order to maintain its power preponderance and primacy, the unipole has imposed greater pressure on its allies to devote much of their resources and energy to contributing to its global defense posture ... [It] is expected that the systemic properties of unipolarity–non-structural threat and a power preponderance of the unipole–gradually increase the political and economic burdens of the allies in need of maintaining alliance relationships with the unipole."

"Some of the wars America fought were "simply for profit" and the sanctions it has imposed on certain countries have been as destructive as wars... The American people have virtually no say over when we go to war. These decisions are made in back rooms somewhere...The American people continue to be lied to about why we go to war, because again, one of the big reasons is simply for profit, and that's always been true to some extent, but now it is in a very naked way."

"[On the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan] From a strategic point of view, it has to be seen as a complete failure, and yet it went on for 20 years, why did it go on for 20 years? Because the defense industry companies that make the bombs, that make the planes, that make the vehicles, and also the private military contractors that now are fighting the wars in lieu of public military personnel, they made trillions of dollars as long as the war continued. So they didn't care if the war was ever won, the goal was for the war to simply continue forever... the point is not to win the war, but to make sure it never ends because you're going to keep making profits. The U.S. is not advancing human rights through its military interventions. It's not advancing humanitarianism. In fact, it's undermining it in a huge way."

"Since September 11, 2001 ... if not earlier, the idea of American empire is back ... Now ... for the first time since the early Twentieth century, it has become acceptable to ask whether the United States has become or is becoming an empire in some classic sense.""

"Now we are doing imperialism with a black face."

"As it happened in the 20th century, the American boys went to fight in two world wars, many of them lost their lives. The United States won the wars, won the land, but you gave back every piece of it. America didn't keep anything out of her victories for herself. You gave back Japan, an improved Japan, you gave Germany, an improved Germany, you've heard the Marshall Plan."

"I think if we look at the history of the European empires, the answer must be no. It is often assumed that because America possesses the military capability to become an empire, any overseas interest it does have must necessarily be imperial. ...In a number of crucial respects, the United States is, indeed, very un-imperial.... America bears not the slightest resemblance to ancient Rome. Unlike all previous European empires, it has no significant overseas settler populations in any of its formal dependencies and no obvious desire to acquire any. ...It exercises no direct rule anywhere outside these areas, and it has always attempted to extricate itself as swiftly as possible from anything that looks as if it were about to develop into even indirect rule."

"Far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II. We were willing to do it, glad to do it. We went to Korea. We went to Vietnam. All in the interest of preserving the rights of people. And when all those conflicts were over, what did we do? Did we stay and conquer? Did we say, 'Okay, we defeated Germany. Now Germany belongs to us? We defeated Japan, so Japan belongs to us'? No. What did we do? We built them up. We gave them democratic systems which they have embraced totally to their soul. And did we ask for any land? No. The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead, and that is the kind of nation we are."

"It must be recalled that North America was that part of the European capitalist system which had been the most direct beneficiary of the massacre of the American Indians and the enslavement of Africans. The continued exploitation of African peoples within its own boundaries and in the Caribbean and Latin America must also be cited as evidence against American monster imperialism. The U.S.A. was a worthy successor to Britain as the leading force and policeman of the imperialist/colonialist world from 1945 onwards."

"No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America's sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world. America took nothing from that Century's terrible wars - no land from Germany or Japan or Korea; no treasure; no oath of fealty. America's resolve in the defense of liberty has been tested time and again. It has not been found wanting, nor must it ever be. America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom."

"A political unit that has overwhelming superiority in military power, and uses that power to influence the internal behavior of other states, is called an empire. Because the United States does not seek to control territory or govern the overseas citizens of the empire, we are an indirect empire, to be sure, but an empire nonetheless. If this is correct, our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position and maintaining imperial order."

"According to [[Mike Pompeo|Pompeo [U.S. Secretary of State] ]], Chinese leader Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) harbor a “decades-long desire for global hegemony.” This is ironic. Only one country – the US – has a defense strategy calling for it to be the “preeminent military power in the world,” with “favorable regional balances of power in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere.” China’s defense white paper, by contrast, states that “China will never follow the beaten track of big powers in seeking hegemony,” and that, “As economic globalization, the information society, and cultural diversification develop in an increasingly multi-polar world, peace, development, and win-win cooperation remain the irreversible trends of the times.” US military spending totaled $732 billion in 2019, nearly three times the $261 billion China spent. The US.. has around 800 overseas military bases, while China has just one (a small naval base in Djibouti). The US has many military bases close to China, which has none anywhere near the US. The US has 5,800 nuclear warheads; China has roughly 320. The US has 11 aircraft carriers; China has one. The US has launched many overseas wars in the past 40 years; China has launched none (though it has been criticized for border skirmishes, most recently with India, that stop short of war)."

"... so influential has been the discourse insisting on American specialness, altruism and opportunity, that imperialism in the United States as a word or ideology has turned up only rarely and recently in accounts of the United States culture, politics and history. But the connection between imperial politics and culture in North America, and in particular in the United States, is astonishingly direct."

"Many democrats, liberals, traditional conservatives, and even some leftists continue to tell themselves that the election of Joe Biden was the first step toward restoring U.S. standing in the world after the damage caused by Donald Trump. And in a variety of ways — many stylistic and some substantive — that perspective has merit. But when it comes to national security policy, the U.S. has been on a steady, hypermilitarized arc for decades. Taken broadly, U.S. policy has been largely consistent on “national security” and “counterterrorism” matters from 9/11 to the present.... Biden’s election slogan was “America is back.” The truth is that “America” never left. There will be no major departures from the imperial course under Biden. While the drone wars continue, and the shift back to Cold War posturing in Europe and Asia accelerates, Biden will maintain the hostile stance toward left movements and governments throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. On climate change, Biden will reverse some of Trump’s most extreme stances, while still placing the profits of major corporations and the military industry over the health of the planet. The militarization of the borders and the maltreatment of refugees will remain, and the vast domestic surveillance apparatus will endure. The stark truth is this: The interests of the War Party trump any political disputes between the Democrats and the Republicans."

"Better than the American Century or the Pax Americana, the notion of an American Lebensraum captures the specific and global historical geography of U.S. ascension to power. After World War II, global power would no longer be measured in terms of colonized land or power over territory. Rather, global power was measured in directly economic terms. Trade and markets now figured as the economic nexuses of global power, a shift confirmed in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which not only inaugurated an international currency system but also established two central banking institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—to oversee the global economy. These represented the first planks of the economic infrastructure of the postwar American Lebensraum."

"The term "imperialism" is no more precise, and its overuse and recent abuse is making it nearly meaningless as an analytical concept...."imperialism" is "more often the name of the emotion that reacts to a series of events than a definition of the events themselves. Where Colonization finds analysts and analogies, imperialism must contend with crusaders for and against."

"I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

"Sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis in Venezuela, says UN human rights expert Idriss Jazairy. His comments follow the imposition of sanctions on Venezuela’s national oil company by the United States. “I am especially concerned to hear reports that these sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela... Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state. The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law ... His call echoed comments by the Spokesman for the UN Secretary General, underscoring “the urgent need for all relevant actors to engage in an inclusive and credible political dialogue to address the long crisis facing the country, with full respect for the rule of law and human rights"."

"To the extent that Americans think about these bases at all, we generally assume they’re essential to national security and global peace. Our leaders have claimed as much since most of them were established during World War II and the early days of the Cold War. As a result, we consider the situation normal and accept that US military installations exist in staggering numbers in other countries, on other peoples’ land. On the other hand, the idea that there would be foreign bases on US soil is unthinkable. While there are no freestanding foreign bases permanently located in the United States, there are now around 800 US bases in foreign countries. Seventy years after World War II and 62 years after the Korean War, there are still 174 US “base sites” in Germany, 113 in Japan, and 83 in South Korea, according to the Pentagon. Hundreds more dot the planet in around 80 countries, including Aruba and Australia, Bahrain and Bulgaria, Colombia, Kenya, and Qatar, among many other places. Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history."

"It would still be wrong to see the American occupation of Hawaii (1897) and the occupation of the Philippines and Cuba in the wake of the Spanish–American War (1898) as too radical a departure in US foreign relations. The American involvement with East Asia, both in commercial and political terms, goes back to the 1840s – it was US naval vessels, after all, that forced Western trade on Japan in 1854. The Mexican War of 1846–48 – in which Matthew Perry of later Japanese fame had served with distinction – also brought the United States into closer contact with the Caribbean and Central America. In 1855 the American William Walker set himself up as the ruler of Nicaragua, and numerous other adventurers in the late nineteenth century attempted to follow his example. And, as we know, American interventionism in the Caribbean did not end with Cuba: between 1898 and 1920 US Marines were used on at least twenty separate occasions in the region. What does set the late 1890s apart, though, was the willingness of the American federal state under McKinley and Roosevelt to take political responsibility for the overseas peoples under its control. In a way historians have been right in seeing the establishment of an American transoceanic empire as an aberration – a short-term reaction to the culmination of European imperialism and an attempt at conforming to the global system it created. By taking up the white man’s burden – as Kipling had implored it to do in his poem – the United States found a place as one among the Western great powers. The problem for the American imperialists was, however, that America was already fast becoming something more than one among many: in terms of its economic and military power, it did not need to conform or to take on a role that, in ideological terms, was foreign to it. Rather than being one imperial power, the United States was fast becoming the protector and balancer of a capitalist world system. It was that role that America formally assumed – even with regard to Europe itself – during World War I."

"The routine lust for land, markets or security became justifications for noble rhetoric about prosperity, liberty and security."

"The Constitution says that anyone "born or naturalized in the United States" is a citizen of the country. But for U.S. territories, eligibility for birthright citizenship in the territories is controlled only by Congress – it is not constitutionally guaranteed."

"Residents of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas Islands are deemed U.S. citizens under the Immigration and Nationality Act. But American Samoans are not. Congress has not granted birthright citizenship to residents of American Samoa or Swains Island, both of which are classified only as "outlying possessions." It is this disparate treatment that was before the court, after three American Samoans living in Utah brought a challenge to the Immigration and Nationality Act, contending that the statutory denial of citizenship is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause. The Citizenship Clause was adopted after the Civil War primarily to protect the birthright citizenship of Black Americans, which was rejected by the Supreme Court prior to the Civil War. However, the meaning of the clause for residents of the territories has historically been contested — as has the force of constitutional protections in the territories altogether. In this case, Fitisemanu v. U.S., the American Samoans contend that the residents of all the territories should be considered "in the United States" for the purpose of citizenship. While American Samoans who live in the States may apply for citizenship, before they successfully do so they are denied many of the rights attached to citizenship, such as the right to vote, run for office, or serve on juries. The plaintiffs in this case say their career opportunities have been curtailed and that, as non-citizens, they are unable to sponsor immigration visas for their families. Applying for citizenship itself is onerous, can take several years, and is not guaranteed."

"The Constitution's underlying disparity in treatment between the 50 states and the U.S. territories was enshrined in the Insular Cases, a series of cases decided in the early 1900s after the Spanish-American War. These cases — so called because of their "insular" (island-related) focus — held that full constitutional rights apply only to "incorporated" territories destined for statehood, such as Hawaii, but not to "unincorporated" territories, which then included Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Infamously, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories rested on explicitly racist stereotypes about individuals from those territories. Opposing Filipino statehood, for example, one senator called Filipinos "unruly and disobedient." Another called them "mongrels." Under the Insular Cases, which were primarily about tariffs and jury trials in the territories, the Supreme Court upheld this suspect "incorporated vs. unincorporated" framework of rights. The Court's language and reasoning was hardly any better than that of Congress. One case emphasized that "differences of race, habits, laws and customs" in the territories might require action on the part of Congress that wouldn't be required if the territory were "inhabited only by people of the same race." Another referred to "savage tribes" which may be "[in]capable of self-government." It is this insidious foundation of the Insular Cases that has drawn the condemnation of both liberal and conservative justices. In Vaello-Madero, a case from last term about Puerto Ricans' eligibility for disability benefits, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a 10-page concurrence calling for the Insular Cases to be overruled — something that is now unlikely to happen any time soon."

"Realization of the strategic plans for future aggression is connected with the desire to utilize to the utmost the war production facilities of the United States, which had grown to enormous proportions by the end of World War II. American imperialism is persistently pursuing a policy of militarizing the country. Expenditure on the US army and navy exceeds 11,000 million dollars per annum. In 1947-48, 35 per cent of America’s budget was appropriated for the armed forces, or eleven times more than in 1937-1938. On the outbreak of World War II the American army was the seventeenth largest in the capitalist world; today it is the largest one. The United States is not only accumulating stocks of atomic bombs; American strategists say quite openly that it is preparing bacteriological weapons. The strategic plans of the United States envisage the creation in peacetime of numerous bases and vantage grounds situated at great distances from the American continent and designed to be used for aggressive purposes against the USSR and the countries of the new democracy. America has built, or is building, air and naval bases in Alaska, Japan, Italy, South Korea, China, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Austria, and Western Germany. There are American military missions in Afghanistan and even in Nepal. Feverish preparations are being made to use the Arctic for purposes of military aggression."

"Our well-founded claim, grounded on continuity, has greatly strengthened, during the same period, by the rapid advance of our population toward the territory—its great increase, especially in the valley of the Mississippi—as well as the greatly increased facility of passing to the territory by more accessible routes, and the far stronger and rapidly-swelling tide of population that has recently commenced flowing into it."

"What do we want with this vast, worthless area? This region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs? To what use could we ever hope to put these great deserts, or those endless mountain ranges, impenetrable and covered to their very base with eternal snow? What can we ever hope to do with the western coast, a coast of three thousand miles, rock-bound, cheerless, uninviting, and not a harbor on it? What use have we for this country?"

"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."

"The AK-47 went head-to-head with the M-16, and emerged on the winning side."

"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."

"I put the uniform away. I didn't talk about my experiences except with other Veterans. I didn't join the VFW, the American Legion, or any of the war protests that were still happening. I just wanted to be left alone and get busy with life. I was proud of my service even though the country didn't seem to be proud of us. I remember when I heard the news that Saigon had fallen. I was a Missouri State Trooper by then and I had to pull over to the road shoulder and stop. I kept wondering, "Why?" All those lives, all the wounded. America: two wins, one tie, one loss. Later, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, I remember watching the "Welcome Home" shows. I got teary-eyed watching the surprise visits by soldiers to their kids' schools and the excitement in the families' eyes when they saw them. That is what homecomings are supposed to be like. I remember welcoming my Marine Corps son home from Afghanistan (twice), my sailor son came home after a deployment to the Middle East on the carrier, George H.W. Bush. I remember all the Patriot Guard missions to welcome home servicemen and women. I also remember the PGR missions for the KIAs (killed in action). Lives ended too soon. Less than 9% of the population has ever served in the military, around 3% have ever served in combat. Too many people are too wrapped up in the Kardashians, Miley Cyrus, iPhones, tweets, fashion, or just daily life to consider the Veterans and active duty military. Next time you see someone wearing a Veteran ball cap or uniform, thank them for serving. They will appreciate it."

"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!""

"1968- This is when it began to dawn on me that there was a serious competition going on in America to see who could be the biggest group of assholes: the right-wing assholes who thought that the Vietnam War was a good thing, as long as they personally did not have to go over to Vietnam and get shot at; or the left-wing assholes who thought that what we really needed was for more people to shoot each other here at home. It seemed as if both sets of assholes were winning in 1968. The King assassination did, in fact, result in terrible riots; and the Vietnam War, despite its growing unpopularity, became the longest in American history, with more U.S. troops over there than ever, and more men being drafted, and no end in sight."

"The antiwar protests led to pro-war- or more accurately, anti-anti-war- protests, including a big one in Manhattan in which thousands of people, many of them construction workers, marched through the streets. I went out and watched that one during my lunch hour. My main memory is of two men, both about my age: One was a crew-cut protestor, wearing a tool belt; the other was a long-haired guy on the sidewalk. The long-haired guy started yelling "STOP THE WAR! STOP THE WAR!" The crew-cut guy ran over to him and, stopping just short of making physical contact, began yelling "BETTER DEAD THAN RED! BETTER DEAD THAN RED!" The two of them stood there, close enough to exchange spittle, screaming slogans at each other. That was political discourse in 1970."

"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."

"Said goodbye to his momma as he left South Dakota To fight for the red, white and blue He was nineteen and green with a new M-16 Just doing what he had to do He was dropped in the jungle where the choppers would rumble With the smell of napalm in the air And the sergeant said "Look up ahead""

"Like a dark evil cloud Twelve-hundred came down on him and twenty-nine more They fought for their lives but most of them died In the One-Seventy-Third Airborne"

"On the eighth of November the angels were crying As they carried his brothers away With the fire raining down and the hell all around There were few men left standing that day Saw the eagle fly through a clear blue sky 1965, the eighth of November"

"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."

"And for the men in the audience, hands down, the worst PTSD in the war is in the women who served as surgical nurses in the Evac Hospitals and on the two hospital ships, doing 12-hour shifts 7 days a week, for 12 months. There were many heroes in that war, and the surgical nurses are among the most deserving of that title. Across the board, you will not find a more patriotic and loyal group of Americans than Vietnam Veterans. Some feel the war was lost from its inception, others feel the execution was terrible, while still others believe it would have ended differently if only Washington had taken the shackles off. Those fine touches aside, few would disagree with the comment "We were like a really good football team with a lousy set of coaches.""

"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."

"Intelligence on Vietcong positions and movements frequently arrived too late to be actionable, delayed in an information-processing infrastructure unable to treat all the data it was fed. And this despite the creation of an unprecedented telecommunications network in a field of operations, with electronic communications gear accounting for a third of all major items of equipment brought into the country and the first use of satellite communications for military purposes in 1965. As Arquilla and Ronfeldt recognize, ‘informational overload and bottlenecking has long been a vulnerability of centralized, hierarchical structures for command and control’"

"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.""

"The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction – all of us who would have remained silent had stability and order been secured. It is not pleasant to say such words, but candor permits no less."

"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."

"Political repression in the United States has reached monstrous proportions. Black and Brown peoples especially, victims of the most vicious and calculated forms of class, national and racial oppression, bear the brunt of this repression. Literally tens of thousands of innocent men and women, the overwhelming majority of them poor, fill the jails and prisons; hundreds of thousands more, including the most presumably respectable groups and individuals, are subject to police, FBI and military intelligence surveillance. The Nixon administration most recently responded to the massive protests against the war in Indochina by arresting more than 13,000 people and placing them in stadiums converted into detention centers. ... Repression is the response of an increasingly desperate imperialist ruling clique to contain an otherwise uncontrollable and growing popular disaffection leading ultimately, we think, to the revolutionary transformation of society."

"I also have very strong feelings and opinions about the way that the U.S. military and the Vietnamese were sold out. The blame doesn't go alone to the press, or to the public, or to the government. Each contributed in large measure and each was influenced by the others. Regardless, the "chicken or egg" situation resulted in the loss of the war. But the real loss was far, far greater. This great nation lost face in the world, lost the respect of allies and adversaries, and most of all, we Americans lost our self-respect and our mutual respect. The strongest opinion I have is this, though. The U.S. may have lost the Vietnam War, but the U.S. military DID NOT lose it! We were not allowed to win it."

"When I was a kid, we watched the Vietnam War on the six o'clock news, and it was desensitizing. You felt you were watching a war film; meanwhile you were really watching these guys getting blown to bits. Parents need to protect their kids from watching that stuff."

"Tens of thousands of American servicemen enjoyed their first exotic port of call, too, this time at Olongapo City. The 20 or so R&R sites in the late 1950's had swelled to 1,567 in Olongapo and another 615 in Angeles city by the late 1980's. Hawaii and the Philippines were only two of the many places where military sexism found its logical expression. Soldiers viewed girls and women there through lenses of compliant Asian femininity but referred to them derogatorily as “slant eyes”. The “little brown sex machines” referred to T-shirts in Okinawa, Japan, morphed quickly into “little brown fucking machines powered by rice” in displays of militarized misogyny. Following six months of service, soldiers tired of drinking and playing billiards and video games could fly cheaply to Thailand, Hong Kong, Okinawa, or South Korea for more of the same, where structurally similar R&R venues had been set up for them. The 500,000 American soldiers in and near Saigon during the Vietnam war were matched in number by women and girls in prostitution, many in a kind of licensing system approved by the U.S. military."

"While Kiem was imagining how he'd look in Vietnamese Navy dress whites, Viet Minh general Vo Nguyen Giap was busy massing tens of thousands of troops around the French-held valley town of Dien Bien Phu, near the Laotian border. Giap's forces choked off the French supply lines, ringing their noose tighter and tighter as the French got thinner and weaker and monsoon rains beat down on their equipment. The French appealed to U.S. president Eisenhower and British prime minister Churchill for help, but it was not forthcoming. On 12 March 1954 Giap's army of fifty thousand men attacked French general Navarre's eleven or twelve thousand with everything in its arsenal. In early May, as Kiem was preparing to take the written exam for the French Naval Academy in Hanoi, Giap's men overran the last of the weakened French forces- and the Viet Minh won the war. Kime was thrilled that his country had finally gained its independence, but he couldn't help worrying that the French defeat might ruin his future plans. Mr. Sach said not to fear: no matter what happened at the postwar negotiating conference, the French would still want to help shape a young navy just starting out. They were human, and that was human nature."

"Kiem knew he had seen the florid face somewhere before. Suddenly he remembered. As commandant of the Vietnamese Naval Academy, Kiem had once made the mistake of assigning three of his cadets to Lt. Comdr. Nguyen Van Luc, also of the River Force, for practical training. All three had come back sick and shaking, telling the same story under repeated questioning. Luc had ordered the cadets to change into their dress whites, handed them rifles, then ordered them to shoot at anything that moved- which they'd taken to be a figure of speech. But a few minutes later their patrol boat had rounded a bend in the river, exposing a small boy with a stick in his hand, tending a water buffalo. "Shoot," Luc had hissed. They had looked at one another in confusion, thinking it some sort of test. "Shoot!" Luc had screamed at them again, so loudly that even the boy at the river's edge had cocked his head and stared. Then Luc had raised his own gun and fired, killing both animal and child. Mercifully there weren't many officers like that in the navy- knowing nothing about the sea, only how to kill. Luc was more like an army than a navy man."

"But before the ships could be brought into the harbor, their guns had to be dismantled, their ammo unloaded, their names painted over, their Vietnamese flags lowered, and the American colors raised. The shame of it was almost unbearable: Kiem and his men were a bunch of losers. They had lost the long war. In all of the excitement and chaos of the past week, it was the first time the realization had fully hit them. But there was still one small thing Kiem could do to help his men save face. He could ask for a proper changing-of-colors ceremony: something to soften the blow of seeing their flag yanked down like a rag. Late that afternoon, on board every ship, an ex-VNN officer made a speech; then a U.S. Navy officer made a speech. As the ropes creaked and the gold flag with three red stripes began to descend, the refugees broke into their national anthem: "Nay cong dan oi..." (Oh citizen of the country...) Their voices soared over the turqoise waters of the Pacific Ocean. Slowly the US flags were hoisted into place. Then the ex-VNN officers walked to the ship's rail, ripped the insignia from their uniforms, and tossed the gold glitter into the sea with their caps. They were civilians, now, not military men. Stripped of their national identities, they could help bring another country's warships into the bay with no shame."

"I had gone in the service when I was seventeen years old. Got out at the age of twenty. I flew a lot between August 1968 and August of 1971. I probably showed the "hippies" more hostility than they aimed at me. Seventeen wasn't a good yezar for understanding. I was an eighteen-year-old corporal when I got stranded in San Francisco by a military flight. I was trying to get to the bus station, on foot, when the guy who passed for the hippie stereotype image picked me up. He drove me as far as I needed to go. Said he had a brother in Vietnam."

"In the nineteen-sixties came the Vietnam War Can somebody tell me what we were fighting for? So many young men died So many mothers cried Now I ask the question Was God on our side?"

"While my son was home on leave from Vietnam, a Presbyterian minister refused to shake his hand as we were leaving church. He said he could not and would not shake my son's hand because of the killing my son was involved in. Needless to say, my son doesn't venture to church very often even after all these years and different ministers."

"I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, "What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail"."

"With 450,000 U.S. troops now in Vietnam, it is time that Congress decided whether or not to declare a state of war exists with North Vietnam. Previous congressional resolutions of support provide only limited authority. Although Congress may decide that the previously approved resolution on Vietnam given President Johnson is sufficient, the issue of a declaration of war should at least be put before the Congress for decision."

"I don't want these fucking medals, man! The Silver Star--the third highest medal in the country--it doesn't mean anything! Bob Smeal died for these medals; Lieutenant Panamaroff died so I got a medal; Sergeant Johns died so I got a medal; I got a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, Army Commendation medal, eight air medals, national defense, and the rest of this garbage--it doesn't mean a thing!"

"I figured if this medal is so important let's make it important. Here it is. You can have it back. End the war in Vietnam. What else is there? There was nothing else. I wouldn't put them on the wall for my son. That was the last thing in the world I would ever want my son to revere."

"This "cybernetic model" was adopted during the Vietnam War and endorsed by General William Westmoreland, leader of United States forces during the conflict. It influenced his vision for the near future of combat. In 1969 he predicted that within ten years the United States could experience an automated battlefield that thrived on information and consisted of "computer assisted intelligence evaluation," automated fire control and "24-hour real or near-real time surveillance of all types." Unfortunately, this technologically adept war fighting style was not to be as the debacle of Vietnam shook the scientific fundamentals that backed the cybernetic model of war. Confidence in statistical data returning from the front that indicated success on paper caused commanders to continue feeding the numbers back into the system and exacerbated the real problem. The cybernetic model masked the reality that the United States was losing the war to a less advanced, less trained and more poorly equipped Third World guerrilla force. "Defeat in Vietnam exposed the shortcomings of cybernetic warfare and revealed the inherent limitations of its attempt to make war into an entirely controllable and predictable activity.” Vietnam was a rude awakening that caused a shift from the cybernetic model to what international relations expert Antoine Bousquet refers to as "chaoplexity," a term combining the chaos and complexity of the modern battlefield. This model retains the technology dependence of the cybernetic model but discards the top-down "command and control" structure for a non-linear network. Computer scientist Christopher Langton supports this method saying "since it's effectively impossible to cover every conceivable situation, top-down systems are forever running into combinations of events they don't know how to handle.”"

"No doubt the funniest exploit I was involved in was dropping leaflets on the Bob Hope Christmas show at Cu Chi in 1969. Our company was assigned to provide perimeter security and air cover for the show, so none of our guys would get to see it. The night before, some enlisted men came to me with boxes of small white leaflets upon which they had written messages welcoming Bob Hope to Cu Chi. Three platoons had stayed up all night making these things, and they begged me to drop them on the show, since they knew I'd be up there. I told them it was closed airspace and you can't do that without getting into big trouble, but in a weak moment I let them talk me into it. Sure enough, in the middle of the show, I took a sharp turn, ignored the controller in my earphones, who wanted to know what I thought I was doing, and we dropped the leaflets. If you watch the videotape of that show, you can see Hope looking up as the leaflets came down. The next day, I was called in front of the CO, but he let me off when I explained why I had done it. In 1975, I was finishing my college degree at Saint Martin's in Olympia, Washington. Nobody could figure out who to get for a graduation speaker, so I suggested Bob Hope. Everyone said, "Great, you go get him." It took some time, working through his assistants, but I finally got him on the phone and explained that I was the guy who dropped the snow on his show at Cu Chi. "Why'd you do that?" he immediately asked. When I explained how I couldn't turn the troops down, he said, "Okay, I'll speak at your graduation." And he did. I was his escort the whole day, and he continued to pepper me with questions."

"The Communist leaders in Moscow, Peking and Hanoi must fully understand that the United States considers the freedom of South Viet Nam vital to our interests. And they must know that we are not bluffing in our determination to defend those interests."

"The presence of a Viet Nam veteran in uniform in his home town was often the occasion for glares and slurs. He was not told that he had fought well; nor was he reassured that he had done only what his country and fellow citizens had asked him to do. Instead of reassurance there was often condemnation- baby killer, murderer- until he too began to question what he had done and, ultimately, his sanity. The result was that at least 500,000- perhaps as many as 1,500,000- returning Viet Nam veterans suffered some degree of psychiatric debilitation, called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an illness which has become associated in the public mind with an entire generation of soldiers send to war in Vietnam."

"The authors of NSC-68 had assumed that there could be separate standards of conduct in these two spheres: that American leaders could learn "not to be good" in waging the Cold War while remaining "good" within the framework of their own domestic democratic society. It had been hard enough to maintain that separation during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years: both presidents had been forced to admit that their "denials" in the U-2 and Bay of Pigs incidents had not been "plausible." With the Vietnam War, the line between what was allowed overseas and what was permitted at home disappeared altogether. The Johnson administration found it impossible to plan or prosecute the war without repeatedly concealing its intentions from the American people, and yet the decisions it made profoundly affected the American people. Far from measuring up to "its own best traditions" in fighting the Cold War, as Kennan had hoped it would, the United States in fighting the Vietnam War appeared to be sacrificing its own best traditions of constitutional and moral responsibility."

"The most important departure from determinism during the Cold War had to do, obviously, with hot wars. Prior to 1945, great powers fought great wars so frequently that they seemed to be permanent features of the international landscape: Lenin even relied on them to provide the mechanism by which capitalism would self-destruct. After 1945, however, wars were limited to those between superpowers and smaller powers, as in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, or to wars among smaller powers like the four Israel and its Arab neighbors fought between 1948 and 1973, or the three India-Pakistan wars of 1947-48, 1965, and 1971, or the long, bloody, and indecisive struggle that consumed Iran and Iraq throughout the 1980s."

"You know, we get involved in these wars and we don't know a damn thing about those countries, the culture, the history, the politics, people on top and even down below. And, my heavens, these are not wars like World War II and World War I, where you have battalions fighting battalions. These are wars that depend on knowledge of who the people are, with the culture is like. And we jumped into them without knowing. That’s the damned essential message of the Pentagon Papers."

"The United States has a strategy based on arithmetic. They question the computers, add and subtract, extractsquare roots, and then go into action. But arithmetical strategy doesn’t work here. If it did, they would already have exterminated us with their airplanes."

"For years I had been hearing stories that when American troops returned home from Vietnam, they were spat upon by anti-war protestors. The stories were usually very specific. A soldier, fresh from Vietnam duty, wearing his uniform, gets off the plane at an American airport, where he is spat upon by "hippies." For some reason, in the stories it is always an airport where the spitting allegedly happened, and it is always "hippies" who allegedly did the spitting. In recent years, as we all know, there has been an undeniable shift in the public's attitude toward the men who fought in the Vietnam War. The symbols of this new attitude are many- the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is the most dramatic, but the box-office successes of such movies as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket are also testimony that, while the nation may still be divided over the politics of the war, the soldiers themselves are finally being welcomed home with warmth and gratitude. Yet even while the country has begun to tell the Vietnam veterans that they are loved and respected, the stories have continued to circulate; when those veterans returned from Vietnam, they were spat upon. Usually in airports. By hippies."

"I began to wonder about that. Even during the most fervent days of anti-war protest, it seemed that it was not the soldiers whom protestors were maligning. It was the leaders of government, and the top generals- at least that is how it seemed in memory. One of the most popular chants during the anti-war marches was, "Stop the war in Vietnam, bring the boys home." You heard that at every peace rally in America. "Bring the boys home." That was the message. Also, when one thought realistically about the image of what was supposed to have happened, it seemed questionable. So-called "hippies," no matter what else one may have felt about them, were not the most macho people in the world. Picture a member of the Green Berets, in full uniform, walking through an airport. Now think of a "hippie" crossing his path. Would the hippie have the nerve to spit on the soldier? And if the hippie did, would the soldier- fresh from facing enemy troops in the hungles of Vietnam- just stand there and take it? I raised the question in my syndicated newspaper column. Approximately 2.6 million Americans served in Vietnam. To our lasting sorrow, some 56,000 of them died. But more than 2 million Vietnam veterans came back alive. It is to those veterans that I posed the question: Were you spat upon when you returned from Vietnam?"

"I did not ask the question lightly, or out of idle curiosity. It seemed to me that if the spitting-on-soldiers stories were true, we should know it. If they were myth, we should know that, too. I asked the potential respondents of the survey to provide approximate dates, places, and circumstances. The response was astonishing. From every section and corner of the country, well over a thousand people took the time to sit down, put their thoughts on paper, and tell me what happened when they returned to the U.S. from Vietnam. Virtually no one sent a letter with a simple confirmation or denial of being spat upon; the letters were long, sometimes rambling, invariably gripping essays on what it felt like to come back home after that war. It was as if by asking that specific, quirky question- "Were you spat upon when you returned?"- I had touched a button that would not have been touched had i asked a general question about the homecoming experience. To sum it up quickly... I have no doubt that many returning veterans truly were spat upon- literally- as a part of their welcome home. There were simply too many letters, going into too fine a detail, to deny the fact. I was profoundly moved by how, all these years later, so many men remembered exactly where and when they were spat upon, and how the pain has stayed with them. On the other hand, many veterans reported stories of kindness and compassion upon their return from Vietnam. Most of this group of veterans said they believe some of their fellow soldiers were spat upon- but said that they wanted the country to know that, in the late Sixties and the first half of the Seventies, there were American civilians eager to show their warmth to returning veterans, too. Other veterans said they were not spat upon, and were skeptical about the spitting stories. Many more, though, said that the question- if taken literally- was irrelevant. They said it didn't matter whether a civilian actually worked up sputum and propelled it toward them- they said that they were made to feel small and unwanted in so many other ways that it felt like being spat upon."

"Obviously the subject of this book will be of interest to people who served in Vietnam. But if that is all the book is, then it is a waste. This is an American story- a story of an amazing, troubling time in our history that may never be repeated again. In many ways, it is far more important for people who were never in Vietnam to read it than it is for the veterans to read it. The veterans already know the story."

"Our equipment consisted of a powerful loudspeaker of the kind used in football stadiums, which could be carried on the operator’s back. Another team member backpacked the 40-pound load of batteries that kept the speaker going. Our gear also included a tape recorder and a number of Vietnamese language tapes that directed the enemy to surrender. The idea was that when one of the U.S. battalions engaged with the VC or North Vietnamese regulars, my team would be helicoptered to the site of the fighting and begin broadcasting surrender demands. In addition, one of the several English-speaking Vietnamese interpreters assigned to the brigade would be made available to us for conveying gentler messages."

"We were also told by the brigade’s intelligence section that the communist forces had an especially high regard for propaganda and psychological operations, and thus if we were taken prisoner, a price would be put upon our heads. They suggested that we exchange our psychological warfare shoulder patches for the ivy cloverleaf insignia of the 4th Division, which we were happy to do, since the division had a long and glorious history during World Wars I and II, and we didn’t want to have our heads chopped off."

"We also had, at our disposal, an AC-47 “Gabby” aircraft—a twin-engine Douglas DC-3 in civilian life. We used it to circle above the enemy’s suspected hiding places and play scary funereal music over the loudspeakers to cause them to run away in terror or at least to keep their troops awake all night. If the weather conditions were just right, some of these airplanes were equipped with a kind of movie projector that would shine big dragons or other frightful things onto low-hanging clouds. A downside of these tactics was that they could cause any friendly South Vietnamese troops in the neighborhood to run away also."

"The Vietnam veteran's belief in the justice of his cause and the necessity for his acts was constantly challenged and ultimately bankrupt when South Vietnam fell to an invasion from the North in 1975. A dim foreshadowing of this form of trauma can be seen in World War I, when the war ended without the unconditional surrender of the enemy, and many veterans bitterly understood that it wasn't really over, over there. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War it might legitimately be argued that we did not lose in Vietnam any more than we lost in the Battle of the Bulge: we got pushed back for a while, but ultimately we won the war. But today such a perspective is small consolation to the Vietnam vet. For the Vietnam veteran there is no walking Flanders Field, no reenactment of D Day, no commemoration of Inchon, or any other celebration by grateful nations whose peace and prosperity was preserved by American blood and sweat and tears. For too many years the Vietnam veterans knew only the defeat of a nation they fought and suffered for and the victory of a regime that many of them believed to be evil and malignant enough to risk dying to fight against."

"Ultimately, they may have been vindicated. The containment policy that they were an instrument of has been successful. Now the Russians themselves will concede the evils of communism. Hundreds of thousands of boat people attest to the disastrous nature of the North Vietnamese regime. Now the Cold War has ended in victory. And from one perspective we were no more defeated in Vietnam than U.S. forces were in the Philippines or at the Battle of the Bulge. They lost the battle but won the war. And the war was worth fighting. Perhaps we can see Vietnam from that perspective now, and I believe that there is truth and healing in that perspective. But for most Vietnam veterans this "victory" comes more than two decades too late."

"The greatest indignity heaped upon the soldier waited for him when he returned home. Often veterans were verbally abused and physically attacked or even spit upon. The phenomenon of returning soldiers being spit on deserves special attention here. Many Americans do not believe (or do not want to believe) that such events ever occurred. Bob Greene, a syndicated newspaper columnist, was one of those who believed these accounts were probably a myth. Greene issued a request in his column for anyone who had actually experienced such an event to write in and tell of it. He received more than a thousand letters in response, collected in his book, Homecoming."

"The Vietnam vet, the average vet who did no killing, is suffering an agony of guilt and torment created by society's condemnation. During and immediately after Vietnam our society judged and condemned millions of returning veterans as accessories to murder. At one level many, even most, of these horrified, confused veterans accepted society's media-driven, kangaroo-court conviction as justice and locked themselves in prisons of the worst kind, prisons in their mind. A prison whose name was PTSD."

"When they started drafting for Vietnam in the late sixties, my son Gene was about twenty. He enlisted in the Army to go to the 101st Airborne like his pop. By that time the 101st Airborne had changed from paratroopers to an airmobile division. They were trained as paratroopers, too, but instead of being jumpers they were used to fly and rappel down from helicopters. I got my son billy exempt from duty. I knew what it was all about, and I wasn't about to send both sons. I told them Billy had to stay home and take care of me. I lied, but I'm glad I did it. That conflict was a mess, just like Iraq. Decisions are made with no common sense, and our kids go, they give their all, and they give their lives. Thank God Gene came back alive. He came home, and we never talked about it. You never talked about it in those days. He said, "How in the hell you done it, Pop, I'll never know." He got married and had six children. Billy had three children. Today I have twenty-two grandchildren and great-grandchildren. With Vietnam, I finally understood what my parents went through. My wife and I were worried every minute, and it was hard keeping Frannie calm. When you lose a kid, that stays with you forever. At that time, America was an entirely different country from what it was during WWII. When I went to war, we had good government, good leaders. They had common sense. Today, nobody has common sense. You mix politics and religion, you got trouble. America gets worse, not better. No common sense, no patriotism. Everybody was trying to get their kids out of going to Vietnam, trying everything. They sent them to live in Canada. They laughed at you because you sent your kids. An entirely different generation."

"William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, Brothers in Battle: Best of Friends: Two WWII Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story (2007) by William Guarnere and Edward Heffron with Robyn Post. New York: Berkley Caliber, p. 231-232"

"Since 1975, more than 40,000 Vietnamese are believed to have been killed and about 60,000 others maimed by what is known as unexploded ordnance — land mines, artillery shells, cluster bombs and the like that failed to detonate decades ago. Quang Tri Province alone, along the border that once divided Vietnam into North and South, is said to have been more heavily bombed than all of Germany was in World War II."

"We underestimated the willingness of these peasants to pay the price. We won every set piece battle. Westy believes that he never lost a battle. We had absolute military superiority, and they had absolute political superiority, which meant that we would kill 200 and they would replenish them the next day. We were fighting the birth rate of a nation."

"George, without doubt, the Army will be blamed for any failures in the Vietnam War."

"The struggle for Vietnam, a poor South-East Asian country the size of California, comprising mountains, jungles and paddies which enchant twenty-first-century tourists but were uncongenial to twentieth-century Western warriors, lasted three decades and cost between two and three million lives. In the eyes of the world, and even those of the communists’ Chinese and Soviet armourers, for the first twenty years it was a marginal affair. During its last phase, however, the war seized the imagination, roused the dismay and indeed revulsion of hundreds of millions of Western people, while destroying one US president and contributing to the downfall of a second. In the wave of youthful protest against authority which swept many countries in the 1960s, rejection of old sexual morality and an enthusiasm for the joys of marijuana and LSD became conflated with lunges against capitalism and imperialism, of which Vietnam appeared an exceptionally ugly manifestation. Moreover, many older Americans who lacked sympathy for any of those causes came to oppose the war because it was revealed as the fount of systematic deceits by their own government, and also seemed doomed to fail."

"Morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States."

""Whatever, Jim." "Oh man, don't call me that." He looked at me. "Every time he gets pissed off he calls me that. Listen, motherfucker, I get outta the Marine Corps early. And I get home leave. The Old Man says I can go next month. "You can't be talkin' me. I jus' don' hear nonna that. I don' hear one word you sayin', Jim." "Aw..." "You jus' another dumb grunt. What I gotta talk to you for? It's like you never hear one word I say to you, ever. Not one word. An' I know... oh man, I jus' know you already signed that paper." Mayhew didn't say anything. It was hard to believe they were the same age. "What I gonna do with you, poor motherfucker? Why... why you jus' don' go runnin' out over th' wire there? Let 'em gun you down an' get it over with. Here, man, here's a grenade. Why you jus' don' go up backa the shithouse an' pull the pin an' lie down on it?" "You're fuckin' unbellievable. Man, it's just four months!" "Four months? Baby, four seconds in this whorehouse'll get you greased. An' your after your poppa an' all that. An' you jus' ain' learned. You're the sorriest, sorriest grunt motherfucker I ever seen. No, man, but the sorriest! Fuckin' Mayhew, man. I feel sorry for you." "Day Tripper? Hey, it'll be okay, you know?" "Sure, baby. Jus' don' talk to me right away. Clean your rifle. Write your momma. Do somethin. Talk to me later." "We can smoke some bullshit." "Okay, baby. Say later." He walked into the bunker and lay down. Mayhew took off his helmet and scratched out something written on the side. It had read 20 April and OUTTA SIGHT!"

"A twenty-four-year-old Special Forces captain was telling me about it. "I went out and killed one VC and liberated a prisoner. Next day the major called me in and told me that I'd killed fourteen VC and liberated six prisoners. You want to see the medal?""

"One day I went out with the ARVN on an operation in the rice paddies above Vinh Long, forty terrified Vietnamese troops and five Americans, all packed into three Hueys that dropped us up to our hips in paddy muck. We spread out and moved toward the marshy swale that led to the jungle. We were still twenty feet from the first cover, a low paddy wall, when we took fire from the treeline. It was probably the working half of a crossfire that had somehow gone wrong. It caught one of the ARVN in the head, and he dropped back into the water and disappeared. We made it to the wall with two casualties. There was no way of stopping their fire, no room to send a flanking party, so gunships were called and we crouched behind the wall and waited. There was a lot of fire coming from the trees, but we were all right as long as we kept down. And I was thinking, Oh man, this is a rice paddy, yes, wow! when I suddenly heard an electric guitar shooting right up in my ear and a mean, rapturous black voice singing, "Now c'mon baby, stop actin' so crazy," and when I got it all together I turned to see a grinning black corporal hunched over a cassette recorder. "Might's well," he said. "We ain' goin' nowhere till them gunships come.""

"The sergeant had lain out near the clearing for almost two hours with a wounded medic. He had called over and over for a medevac, but none had come. Finally, a chopper from another outfit, a LOH, appeared, and he was able to reach it by radio. The pilot told him that he'd have to wait for one of his own ships, they weren't coming down, and the sergeant told the pilot that if he did not land for them he was going to open fire from the ground and fucking well bring him down. So they were picked up that way, but there were repercussions. The commander's code name was Mal Hombre, and he reached the sergeant later that afternoon from a place with the call signal Violent Meals. "God damn it, Sergeant," he said through the static, "I thought you were a professional soldier." "I waited as long as I could, Sir. Any longer, I was gonna lose my man." "This outfit is perfectly capable of taking care of its own dirty laundry. Is that clear, Sergeant?" "Colonel, since when is a wounded trooper 'dirty laundry'?" "At ease, Sergeant," Mal Hombre said, and radio contact was broken."

"I think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods."

"The Vietnam War helped create a new category of unprotected speech: The “true threat.” In 1966, Robert Watts said to a crowd in Washington that “if they ever make me carry a rifle, the first man I want to get in my sights is LBJ.” Watts was promptly arrested for threatening the president. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction, saying that Watts’ speech was “crude political hyperbole,” not a “true threat.” Unfortunately, Watts v. United States did not explain what a true threat is; just what it isn’t. With threats and harassment everywhere on the internet and in “real life,” true threat doctrine seems primed for clarification in the near future. For now, we have only a vague idea of when threatening words leave the protective umbrella of the First Amendment."

"What happens when “speech” isn’t really speech? In 1966, four protesters burned their draft cards to protest the Vietnam War, breaking a 1965 federal law. They appealed to the Supreme Court, which, in a major victory for “symbolic speech,” declared that the First Amendment protected non-verbal expression, too. The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. O’Brien was not a victory for the protesters, however. State legislatures could make laws that limit expression as long as they do not target any particular belief. The Court decided that the law did not target Vietnam protesters, and as a result, the protesters’ convictions were upheld."

"The Vietnam war literally brought this country to its knees because, without going into the technicalities of what Congress might or might not have done to assert its authority, the fact is that on the record it was essentially a Presidential war—as was so viewed around the world. The United States was saved miraculously from disgrace and defeat because the people and the Congress, even though they thoroughly disapproved, still exercised the patience to see it liquidated without terribly undue damage. We still do not know what that damage was or may prove to be in history."

"A State Department working group similarly argued: "Unavoidably, the United States is, together with France, committed in Indochina"-even though a year earlier the Department had explicitly denied this (U.S. Department of Defense, 1971: 152-153)-and concluded, "The whole of Southeast Asia is in danger of falling under Communist domination" (FRUS, 1950, VI: 714). Until Korea these strong words were accompanied by only limited action. As in Europe, there was a great gap between the description of the threat and the proposed remedies. By 1954, of course, the United States seriously considered direct military intervention to prevent a Communist victory. While it is possible that this conflict could have become the vehicle for changing U.S. policy, two considerations make this unlikely. First, much of the American involvement followed and was at least partly caused by the Korean war. Once the United States became more anti-Chinese, defined the threat to its security more broadly, and had more funds available, it became both possible and necessary to try to halt the Viet-Minh. Before Korea, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were in the forefront of those calling for a tougher policy against the Communists, opposed additional commitments. Although they welcomed the May 1950 decision to provide aid to Bao Dai, they were adamant that the United States not stretch its scarce military resources any thinner. Greater involvement in Indochina required greater funds, and in the climate of 1950 they were not likely to be forthcoming. Second, without extensive U.S. involvement, the fall of Indochina probably would not have produced the shock necessary to gain support for American rearmament. If China had sent troops in, the United States might have responded with force, as it did in Korea. However, since the Viet-Minh were capable of winning on their own, it is hard to imagine such a Chinese move."

"In Asia we face an ambitious and aggressive China, but we have the will and we have the strength to help our Asian friends resist that ambition. Sometimes our folks get a little impatient. Sometimes they rattle their rockets some, and they bluff about their bombs. But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

"As I sat in my office last evening, waiting to speak, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home. No one can say exactly what effect those vivid scenes have on American opinion. Historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this Nation during the Korean war, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, or when our men were slugging it our in Europe or when most of our Air Force was shot down that day in June 1942 off Australia."

"Was I spit on at the airport? No. Was I able to find a job when a prospective employer found out I was a Nam vet? No. Was I able to get a date with a girl if she knew I was a Nam vet? No. Was I even welcome at the local American Legion post as a Nam vet? No. Were my parents able to tell people without accusations that their son had just returned from three years in Vietnam? No. I returned in September 1969 and was in Atlanta, Georgia. I denied being a vet until recently because I was repeatedly told that Nam vets had flashbacks and could freak out on the job. I was repeatedly asked how I could live with myself after killing all those innocent people. I could have dealt with being spit on by a hippie. I probably would have broken him in two. Being twenty-one and not being able to get a job, a date, a place to live, or a drink with other vets was the hard part. I still remember."

"I don't think that unless a greater effort is made by the Government to win popular support that the war can be won out there. In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Viet-Nam, against the Communists."

"I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of -- of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn’t know it yet but it’s created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. As a veteran, and one who feels this anger, I’d like to talk about it. We’re angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the Administration of this country."

"In 1970 at West Point, Vice President Agnew said: "Some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedoms which those misfits abuse." And this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, his boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion; and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It’s a distortion because we in no way considered ourselves the best men of this country; because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to; because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam; because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we cannot consider ourselves America’s best men when we were ashamed of and hated what we were called to do in Southeast Asia."

"In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it’s that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We are probably much more angry than that and I don’t want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I’m outclassed here. I know that all of you have talked about every possible -- every possible alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you’ve considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I’m not going to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling which many of the men who’ve returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found that most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace; and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American."

"We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism; and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum. We learned the meaning of "free-fire zones," "shoot anything that moves," and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals. We watched the United States' falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in a European theater -- or let us say a non-third-world people theater. And so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said "That hill has to be taken." And after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for the reoccupation of the North Vietnamese; because -- because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas; because we couldn’t lose, and we couldn’t retreat, and because it didn’t matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881's and Fire Base 6's, and so many others. And now we’re told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese."

"The war the soldiers tried to stop."

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government."

"All during the Vietnam War, I could feel there was a darkness hanging over the whole world and it lasted for so long."

"For my constituents on the East Side of Manhattan, perhaps my most important fight was against the war in Vietnam. I put together one of the first joint resolutions endorsed bot by representatives who supported and who opposed the war, calling for peace. A number of Congressmen simply could not abandon their initial support for our military involvement, even if they had since shifted their positions; they found it hard to publicly admit error. It was a dilemma for them. The resolution succeeded in creating a climate in which some members who realized hey had erred could change their positions with dignity, now that the war appeared unwinnable. My first run-in over the war was with Congressman Wayne Hays, a really mean-spirited bully from Ohio. He was very smart, and one of the great House debaters. At the time, he was the powerful Chairman of the House Administration Committee. During the week of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh's death, I went to the floor and said that, to the Vietnamese, he was like George Washington is to us, the father of his country, and I suggested we use the occasion of his death to extend the hand of friendship. Wayne Hays, in response on the House floor, referred to me as "an emissary from Hanoi." I did not appreciate the charge, so I took Hays's comments from the Congressional Record, placed them alongside my own, and sent them out in a newsletter to my constituents. "Who do you agree with?" I wrote. "Please write to Wayne Hays and tell him what you think." A week or so later, Hays approached me on the floor. "What the hell is goin' on?" he said. "I'm gettin' all these damn letters denouncing me. Stop it!" And then he laughed. I don't think he really cared that he was being deluged with letters form a bunch of liberal New Yorkers. He was amused by the whole thing. I took the exchange with Hays as a kind of signal that I was finally accepted, even by those who thought I was a liberal flake from New York City."

"With time, my opposition to the war grew to where I introduced legislation to give amnesty to the thousands of draft dodgers and deserters in exile in Canada. People really thought I was nuts, including some of my liberal Congressional friends who opposed the war. I knew there was no hope of its passing, not at that time, but I wanted to start the discussion. (As it turned out, I wasn't nuts at all, just ahead of the times; amnesty was finally granted under President Jimmy Carter.)"

"I remember walking down Eighth Street one Friday morning, and being stopped by one of my constituents, an elderly lady who approached me, wanting to talk. "How'm I doing?" I said, in what was becoming the signature greeting of my political career. "Congressman," she said, "you're doing just terrible. How could you support those yellow-bellies? My grandson is in Vietnam, and here you are supporting those yellow-bellies in Canada." "Ma'am," I said, as gently as I could manage. "I don't want to try and persuade you, but let me tell you my position. I think the war is wrong. I think that ultimately we have to bring our boys home. We've ruined too many lives, the draft dodgers' and the deserters' among them. It is time to heal. Now, I understand you see things differently, and I hope your grandson is okay, but this is my position. I hope you'll ultimately agree with me, but it's not necessary that you do. We will never agree on everything." Then I added, "But other than that, how else am I doing?" "Other than that, you're doing wonderful," she said, and we both laughed."

"The American war in Vietnam was not unique and certainly no more reprehensible than numerous other wars, including the earlier French war in Vietnam. But this time it was being pursued by a nation with unprecedented global power. At a time when colonies were struggling to re-create themselves as nations, when the “anticolonial struggle” had touched the idealism of people all over the world, here was a weak and fragile land struggling for independence while this new type of entity known as a “superpower” dropped more non-nuclear bombs on its small territory than had been dropped on all of Asia and Europe in World War II. At the height of 1968 fighting, the U.S. military was killing every week the same number of people or more as died in the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center attack. While within the movements in the United States, France, Germany, and Mexico there was tremendous splintering and factionalism, everyone could agree—because of the power and prestige of the United States and the brutal and clearly unfair nature of the American war in Vietnam—that they opposed the Vietnam War. When the American civil rights movement became split in 1968 between the advocates of nonviolence and the advocates of Black Power, the two sides could come together in agreement on opposition to the Vietnam War. Dissident movements around the world could be built up simply by coming out against the war. When they wanted to protest, they knew how to do it; they knew about marches and sit-ins because of the American civil rights movement. They had seen it all on television from Mississippi, and they were eager to be freedom marchers themselves."

"Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has."

"In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Donald Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed, and al-Qaida wasn't present at that time, but rather, those corporations were the primary beneficiary from his killing. And the war continued after that for approximately one decade. But after it became clear to you that it was an unjust and unnecessary war, you made one of your greatest mistakes, in that you neither brought to account nor punished those who waged this war, not even the most violent of its murderers, Rumsfeld."

"The continuity in the infiltration corridor through Cambodia and Laos mitigated against the forces being stopped. Unlike Greece, fifteen years earlier, which had been able to seal its borders with the help of neighbors, South Vietnam could not count on such aid. Cambodia's port of Sihanoukville made possible the flooding of the South Vietnam battlefield with a family of Sino-Soviet equipment that was completely compatible with that used by VC/NVA forces in the rest of Vietnam. The overthrow of Sihanouk and the closing of the Sihanoukville port in early 1970 were too little too late. Laos was still a wide-open corridor, and U.S. forces were withdrawing. It was never a question of victory for the North, it was only a matter of time."

"All we are saying is give peace a chance."

"U.S. imperialism is trying hard to find a way out by launching a world war. We must take this seriously. The focal point of the present struggle lies in Vietnam. We have made every preparation. Not flinching from maximum national sacrifices, we are determined to give firm support to '-the fraternal Vietnamese people in carrying the war of resistance against U.S. aggression and for national salvation through, to the end."

"One problem that continues to haunt me had to do with my friend Tom. We became great friends in Officer Basic and Ranger School, as did our wives and kids. He was white, I'm African-American, and we were called "Salt and Pepper." He went to Vietnam before I did, and was badly wounded, paralyzed from the chest down, and wasn't going to get any better. His wife finally called me for help, because he shut her out and wanted a divorce. I went there and talked to him, but I couldn't change his mind. He had grown bitter, and was determined not to ruin his wife's life or his kids'. Finally, he left the house, moved in with a brother, and disappeared. It was a real tragedy, and showed me that not all Vietnam casualties have their names on the wall."

"“There’s the old apocryphal story that in 1967, they went to the basement of the Pentagon, when the mainframe computers took up the whole basement, and they put on the old punch cards everything you could quantify. Numbers of ships, numbers of tanks, numbers of helicopters, artillery, machine gun, ammo—everything you could quantify,” says James Willbanks, the chair of military history at U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. “They put it in the hopper and said, ‘When will we win in Vietnam?’ They went away on Friday and the thing ground away all weekend. [They] came back on Monday and there was one card in the output tray. And it said, 'You won in 1965.’” This is, first and foremost, a joke. But given the emphasis that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara placed on data and running the number—I began to wonder if there was actually some software that tried to calculate precisely when the United States would win the war. And if it was possible that it once gave such an answer. The most prominent citation for the apocryphal story comes in w:Harry G. Summers’ study of the war, American Strategy in Vietnam: A Critical Analysis. In this telling, however, it is not the Johnson administration doing the calculation but the incoming Nixon officials: When the Nixon Administration took over in 1969 all the data on North Vietnam and on the United States was fed into a Pentagon computer—population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, number of tanks, ships, and aircraft, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked, “When will we win?” It took only a moment to give the answer: “You won in 1964!” He said “the bitter little story” circulated “during the closing days of the Vietnam War.” It made the point that there “was more to war, even limited war, than those things that could be measured, quantified, and computerized.” There’s no doubt that Vietnam was quantified in new ways. McNamara had brought what a historian called “computer-based quantitative business-analysis techniques” that “offered new and ingenious procedures for the collection, manipulation, and analysis of military data.” In practice, this meant creating vast amounts of data, which had to be sent to computing centers and entered on punch cards. One massive program was the Hamlet Evaluation System, which sought to quantify how the American program of “pacification” was proceeding by surveying 12,000 villages in the Vietnamese countryside. “Every month, the HES produced approximately 90,000 pages of data and reports,” a RAND report found. “This means that over the course of just four of the years in which the system was fully functional, it produced more than 4.3 million pages of information.”"

"When I got out it took a few months for my hair to grow out so I could pass for normal. I couldn't get a regular date if the girl knew I was in the war. If you mentioned Nam they had to go or they changed the subject. None would acknowledge your pain or your experience. You just kept it inside. It wasn't wise to put down that you had been in Nam when you filled out a job application, because they'd think you would bring your problems to work- if you showed up at all. I sat on all of these feelings for 19 years, and now it is good to get it off my chest. We grew up on John Wayne movies. We were ripe for the picking when the war came. They told us that if we didn't stop the Commies in Nam, we would "see the Commies come marching down our streets." So we ended up saps for LBJ. The people who turned their backs on us might not be able to find a soldier when they need one next time. Almost every male in my family has been in the military, but it ended with me. They'll have to kill me to get at my son."

"When I entered West Point, some Americans still believed the Vietnam War might end honorably. By the time I graduated, South Vietnam did not exist. As cadets, we watched the war teeter and implode, and the historical sweep was not lost on us."

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

"Where is your data? Give me something I can put in the computer. Don’t give me your poetry."

"Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war."

"My brother did two tours in Vietnam. During that time I remember him coming home twice. The first visit home was in his uniform, looking and feeling mighty proud to be doing a good deed for our country. The second time he came home to stay. When I saw him, he was in civilian clothes- I remember a striped T-shirt and beige corduroy pants and brown boots. I guess sometime later I must have asked him why he didn't wear his Air Force uniform home. I distinctly remember him saying that if he had worn it, he would have been spat on by the people at the airport who were against the war and who didn't understand that he was over there fighting for them. He said that the people were his own age- people he went to school with. I must have been all of twelve years old at the time, but I will never forget the emptiness and sadness in my big brother's eyes. He was my hero."

"By the summer of 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, the Cold War modus vivendi had largely been shredded. Reporters felt that they were being used to publish the White House’s lies about the progress of the war in Vietnam, and they struck back. Even before the Convention began, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, and NBC had run stories saying that the war was unwinnable, in contradiction to what the Johnson Administration was telling the public. So when the Convention was being planned—Lyndon Johnson did not attend, having withdrawn from the race in March, but he was very much in charge—pains were taken to incommode the news media as much as possible."

"By the end of 1970, people had almost forgotten about Vietnam (although Americans continued to die there for five more years), partly because they were seeing and reading much less about it. The networks understood that most viewers did not want to see images of wounded soldiers or antiwar protesters or inner-city rioters. They also understood that the government held, as it always had, the regulatory hammer."

"Vietnam was the beginning of our present condition of polarization, and one of the features of polarization is that there is no such thing as objectivity or impartiality anymore. In a polarized polity, either you’re with us or you’re against us. You can’t be disinterested, because everyone knows that disinterestedness is a façade. Viewers in 1968 didn’t want fair and balanced. They wanted the press to condemn kids with long hair giving cops the finger."

"When I went back to college at Southern Illinois University in 1971 I was- or at least I felt like- the only hawk on campus. One day I ran into a "friend" I had known there before I went into the service. He seemed genuinely glad to see me and asked whet I'd been doing. I told him I had been in the Marines and in Vietnam. He looked at me like I was dirt and said, "What a sucker." Maybe I was a sucker, but not a coward."

"I do not for a moment regret the 22 years I served my country. I feel a sadness and frustration for the millions of people we abandoned in Vietnam. No, most of us were not spat upon when we came home, but it hurts to remember those who died to help hopeless people on behalf of a nation that- in the last analysis, by its withdrawal- proved it didn't give a damn."

"What, then, had we learned with our sacrifices in the Ia Drang Valley? We had learned something about fighting the North Vietnamese regulars- and something important about ourselves. We could stand against the finest light infantry troops in the world and hold our ground. General Westmoreland thought he had found the answer to the question of how to win this war: He would trade one American life for ten or twelve North Vietnamese lives, day after day, until Ho Chi Minh cried uncle. Westmoreland would learn, too late, that he was wrong; that the American people didn't see a kill ratio of 10-1 or even 20-1 as any kind of bargain."

"But we had validated both the principle and the practice of airmobile warfare. A million American soldiers would ride to battle in Huey helicopters in the next eight years, and the familiar "whup, whup, whup" of their rotors would be the enduring soundtrack if this war. Finally- even though it took ten years, cost the lives of 58,000 young Americans and inflicted humiliating defeat on a nation that had never before lost a war- some of us learned that Clausewitz had it right 150 years earlier when he wrote these words: "No one starts a war- or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so- without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.""

"We'd originally intended to put our medals in a body bag and have them delivered to Congress. But the Nixon administration erected this big wire and wood fence on the steps of our Capitol to keep us out--keep out the young men and women who were fighting that war. And all that did was piss us off and give us the greatest photo opportunity that we could ever have had."

"Since the Vietnamese continued to resist the US-imposed dictatorship in South Vietnam, the United States invaded Vietnam in the early 1960s, beginning a devastating campaign of bombings, atrocities, chemical warfare, and torture, leading to the deaths of 3.8 million people, according to a study published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal). According to Nick Turse in Kill Anything That Moves: [T]he stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some “bad apples,” however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. … [T]hey were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military. Turse’s investigations of US war crimes (spurred by his discovery of the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Crimes Working Group) lend credence to the various displays and photographs one will find in the museum. One example is a sewer pipe present at the Thanh Phong massacre, used by three children to hide in before being killed by future Senator Bob Kerrey and his cohorts (ten other civilians also died)."

"My husband is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War, serving there in 1968. He is not writing this because he says it doesn't matter, and besides he wasn't spat on by hippies in the airport, so why hear from him? Maybe he's right. But there is more than one way to be spat on, and by the attitude and behavior of the American people, my husband was spat on over and over again. He did show up at an airport in full uniform. Just his dad met him there, his mother and sister didn't bother to come along. Then his dad tells him he should never have gone. Questions like, "Were you part of those who burned, raped, and pillaged for our government?" There is a healing in America of the psychological wounds of Vietnam, and that's fine. The tangible evidence of this healing makes most people feel good. But patriotism today is a fad, costing nothing. It's easy to be patriotic, and desirable. Patriotism in 1968 cost arms, legs, eyes, and life. Patriotism in 1968 cost acceptance by the nation. My husband says the inner healing of the combat veteran started a long time ago, by necessity. Those who could, adjusted to their undesirable status in America; those who couldn't, killed themselves, have gone crazy, or escape through drugs and/or alcohol. My husband feels the combat veteran, the one who was right there on the front, fighting and sweating it out, for the most part still feels the betrayal of the American people. We weren't there when they needed us."

"But also out here in this dreary, difficult war, I think history will record that this may have been one of America's finest hours, because we took a difficult task and we succeeded."

"Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support."

"The idea of hippies spitting on "a burly member of the Green Berets" fresh from a tour of duty fighting the North Vietnamese in the bush isn't an accurate description. Just as everybody who opposed the war wasn't a hippie, the typical guy coming back from Nam wasn't a Green Beanie. Most weren't even grunts in the bush. They were rear echelon mother fuckers- ammo humpers, or finance clerks, medics. Maybe they worked in supply or were M.P.s. Not much in their Nam experience would condition them to do anything but "stand there and take it," because for a full year, that's just what they did. They stood there and took it- from colonels, captains, sergeants- even if they never raised an M16 against a VC. For a lot of guys, the enemy had been the Army, not the Nam, and being hassled at the airport in uniform, while unwelcome, was often the last act of harassment in their military careers."

"I still think a lot about Vietnam. I was there in ’69, in Hanoi, and also I traveled through all of the North from the DMZ, and so I saw an awful lot of it and I felt the people very much. I was at that time very involved in dealing with American POWs. I don’t think in my life I’ll ever get over those concerns and the injustice of the United States not simply acting out its responsibilities to Vietnam. Those things are not over for me. And the question of amnesty . . . they’re related."

"I have often reflected that General Abrams, who had worked so hard to make the South Vietnamese armed forces capable of defending their country, at least had been spared the agony of seeing the death of the Republic of Vietnam. Westmoreland, on the other hand, was not spared that trauma, but seems over the years since the war to have become a national scapegoat, blamed for everything that went wrong in Vietnam, large or small, regardless of whether he had even a remote connection with the matter. It is a singularly fair and unsupported judgement. Many scores of senior American officials, civilian and military, including the author, contributed to our Vietnam mistakes, most of which have been so judged in hindsight. The real "blame", of course, must be laid squarely on the Hanoi regime and the North Vietnamese people, who demonstrated to the world that they had the will to prevail. Although it is a small comfort to Westmoreland, history is replete with the examples of one native son's being singled out, rightly or wrongly, as the person responsible for a national disaster."

"From 1971 to 1974, I was a student at the New York University School of Law. As far as I know, I was the only Vietnam vet in my class and perhaps at the law school. I was generally thought of as an exotic species. Some people were curious, some were repelled. Some refused to have anything to do with me. It was not all bad, of course, and I really think that some women went to bed with me just for the experience of having such a strange and weird person. When Nixon and Kissinger conducted the criminal Christmas bombing campaign and the campuses became unruly, I chose not to boycott class because while I disagreed violently with the bombing, I knew Nixon did not give a damn about the boycotts, and when I crossed the picket line I was singled out for abuse."

"I made a decision in 1968, when I enlisted in the Army two weeks before I was to be drafted: Having accepted the benefits this country has to offer, I had a duty to serve, the country had a right to tell me to go in the Army, and the Army had the right to order me to Vietnam. I did and still do think that the war was an awful mistake, that we had no business there, and that we were ruining both their country and ours. And I did and still do feel that I was given unfair, unreasonable treatment both by some of those who were against the war and some of those who supported it. My point is that some people did not make a distinction between a bad policy and the individuals who have to carry it out."

"The trouble is that the goal was never clear. It changed under the Johnson administration from time to time. Our overall goal was pacification, but it didn't work because of lack of strategic direction from the United States. I want to make sure you understand this. The national leadership, the President, did not bring the country into the total scene of the war. There was a lack of unification of the American people. A manifestation of that lack was the failure to mobilize the National Guard and Reserves. In my opinion, one of the great criticisms that will be placed against the leadership will be that failure to mobilize. The point is, when you mobilize the Guard and Reserves, you also act toward mobilizing the people, because some guy gets called out of a drug store and called to active duty, so the burden is not just placed on the career services, who were stretched to the breaking point. Do you see what I'm getting at? You can do all kinds of things to this testimony and make me look like a goddamn nut. But I'm talking about strategic direction plus violation of the fundamental principles of war- of which there are nine. We could have won by more correct adherence to those principles, such as the principle of objective, the principle of unity of command, the principle of surprise and security, all of which were violated. The United States can never afford again to allow itself to be at such a vast strategic disadvantage as we were in Vietnam. I sincerely hope we've learned. We were defeated by an eighth-rate power."

"Though it isn't really war we're sending fifty thousand more to help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese"

"The message of Vietnam is not that Americans will not take casualties; it is that the American people do not want the lives of their sons and daughters wasted."

"The VA recognized over a dozen medical conditions for children of women who served in of Vietnam. However, for the children of the men who served in Vietnam, only Spina Bifida is recognized as being directly connected to Agent Orange exposure."

"The Vietnamese claim that 4 million people were exposed to Agent Orange and 3 million of its people suffer from medical conditions that were caused by the exposure from the Vietnam War. Despite the efforts to decontaminate the soil, the U.S. vehemently denies that the number of Agent Orange illnesses are that high, which according to the Vietnamese includes children of men and women who were exposed to the dioxin following the war."

"...military supplies were sailed directly from North Vietnam on communist-flagged (especially of the Eastern bloc) ships to the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, where that nation's neutrality guaranteed their delivery. The supplies were unloaded and then transferred to trucks which transported them to the frontier zones that served as PAVN/NLF Base Areas.[8] These Base Areas also served as sanctuaries for PAVN/NLF troops, who simply crossed the border from South Vietnam, rested, reinforced, and refitted for their next campaign in safety."

"Twenty-two years of mental tears Cries a suicidal Vietnam vet Who fought a losing war on a foreign shore To find his country didn't want him back Their bullets took his best friend in Saigon Our lawyers took his wife and kids, No regrets In a time I don't remember In a war he can't forget He cried forgive me for What I've done there 'Cause I never meant the things I did" And give me something to believe in If there's a Lord above And give me something to believe in"

"In 1964 our army began to send to the battlefield complete units at their full authorized strength of personnel and equipment... By the end of 1965 our main force army in South Vietnam totaled almost 92,000... Our main force troops grew from 195,000 soldiers in early 1965 to 350,000 soldiers in May 1965 and finally to 400,000 by the end of 1965.. During 1966 the strength of our full-time forces in South Vietnam would be increased to between 270,000 and 300,000 soldiers... By the end of 1966 the total strength of our armed forces was 690,000 soldiers."

"And Townsville lined the footpaths as we marched down to the quay This clipping from the paper shows us young and strong and clean And there's me in me slouch hat with me SLR and greens God help me - I was only nineteen."

"A four-week operation when each step can mean your last one on two legs It was a war within yourself But you wouldn't let your mates down 'til they had you dusted off So you closed your eyes and thought about somethin' else."

"And then someone yelled out "Contact!" and the bloke behind me swore We hooked in there for hours, then a God-almighty roar Frankie kicked a mine the day that mankind kicked the moon God help me He was going home in June."

"And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep? And night time's just a jungle dark and a barking M-16? And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means? God help me - I was only nineteen."

"As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said that if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers."

"I'm not speaking provocatively here. Unlike the other wars of this century, of course, there were deep divisions about the wisdom and rightness of the Vietnam war. Both sides spoke with honesty and fervor. And what more can we ask in our democracy? And yet after more than a decade of desperate boat people, after the killing fields of Cambodia, after all that has happened in that unhappy part of the world, who can doubt that the cause for which our men fought was just? It was, after all, however imperfectly pursued, the cause of freedom; and they showed uncommon courage in its service. Perhaps at this late date we can all agree that we've learned one lesson: that young Americans must never again be sent to fight and die unless we are prepared to let them win."

"Erosion of the law on CBW will facilitate assimilation. That is why the controversy regarding the legal status of herbicides and the sensoy irritant agents, such as CS and the tear gases, has been so important. Largely as a result of their employment by the United States and allied forces in Indo-China, and subsequently by their adversaries, CS weapons are now the furthest advanced toward assimilation of all CB weapons. But the Vietnam-related efforts to reduce, through R&D, the technical and operational limitations of CS weapons, and to increase their military utility and attractions for regular combat forces, has inevitably meant a weakening of at least the technological constraint on the assimilation of all types of CB weapons. This, it should be noted, was by no means an unintended consequence of the use of CS, and herbicides as well, in Vietnam. During an interview, the U.S. Army Chief Chemical Officer was utterly explicit on this point: the Vietnam war provided a much needed opportunity for him to demonstrate the value of his wares to the Army at large, and for the Chemical Corps to secure that combat role which would enhance its status and protect it from bureaucratic repression in Washington. CS employment chemical crop destruction and chemical defoliation were only three of many CBW proposals put forward by the Chemical Corps for the Vietnam war."

"Largely as a result of their employment by the United States and allied forces in Indo-China, and subsequently by their adversaries, CS weapons are now the furthest advanced toward assimilation of all CB weapons. But the Vietnam related efforts to reduce, through R&D, the technical and operational limitations of CS weapons, and to increase their military utility and attractions for regular combat forces, has inevitably meant a weakening of at least the technological constraint on the assimilation of all types of CB weapons. This, it should be noted, was by no means an unintended consequence of the use of CS, and herbicides as well, in Vietnam."

"We went, we served, we did what we were asked."

"In one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, the top American military commander in Saigon activated a plan in 1968 to move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam until he was overruled by President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to recently declassified documents cited in a new history of wartime presidential decisions. The documents reveal a long-secret set of preparations by the commander, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, to have nuclear weapons at hand should American forces find themselves on the brink of defeat at Khe Sanh, one of the fiercest battles of the war. With the approval of the American commander in the Pacific, General Westmoreland had put together a secret operation, code-named w:Fracture Jaw|Fracture Jaw, that included moving nuclear weapons into [[South Vietnam so that they could be used on short notice against North Vietnamese troops."

"“Johnson never fully trusted his generals,” said Mr. Johnson, who is of no relation to the president. “He had great admiration for General Westmoreland, but he didn’t want his generals to run the war.”"

"“In Korea, MacArthur did not make a direct appeal to move nuclear weapons into the theater almost immediately,” when it appeared that South Korea might fall to the North’s invasion in 1950, Mr. Beschloss said. “But in Vietnam, Westmoreland was pressuring the president to do exactly that.”"

"But promises were being broken all around. Most of us in Nam were the children of the last war that was ever supposed to be fought anywhere in the world. All of the baby boys were promised that they would grow up and become successful and all of the baby girls were promised that someday their princes would come. Then along came the goddamn government and bingo, it sent the princes off to battle communism and issued them the right to hate anyone not in their unit. Then it sent them home in body bags, or with their handsome faces melted or blown away, their bodies prematurely aged with disease or terrible wounds, and their idealistic souls turned into sewers. And those were the survivors."

"By late 1967, there were 485,600 American troops in South Vietnam; over the course of the war, nearly 2.6 million American service members would serve in country. While much of the historical discussion around the American military effort has focused on the immense firepower and destruction it entailed, an equally awe-inspiring aspect of the war has been overlooked: logistics. Moving more than two million people — along with their weapons, aircraft, food and medical supplies — in and out of the country was an almost unfathomable challenge. Early in the war, South Vietnam, which even after a century of French rule remained a largely rural nation, simply did not have the seaports and airfields required to receive this level of manpower and sustain military operations. America would have to build those facilities, and much more, from scratch. It would be, in the words of The New York Times correspondent Hanson W. Baldwin, “probably the most massive construction effort ever organized and put into the field in so short a time and the ‘largest military construction contract in history.’”"

"By the end of the war, American forces had constructed six new major airports, with 10,000-foot concrete runways, at Bien Hoa, Cam Ranh Bay, Chu Lai, Phan Rang, Tuy Hoa and Phu Cat, and enlarged the two French-built airfields at Da Nang and Saigon; six new airports were also built in Thailand. Some 100 smaller airfields were built around South Vietnam to accommodate helicopters and supply aircraft. To care for the growing number of American and Vietnamese service members, Americans built 26 hospitals with 8,280 beds. To receive and hold the millions of tons of supplies shipped over, contractors built 10.4 million square feet of covered storage, as well as 5.5 million square feet of ammunition storage and enough tanker farms to hold 3.1 million barrels of petroleum products. Finally, the military built 26 major base camps around Vietnam, some with shopping malls and movie theaters, as well as hundreds of smaller combat firebases."

"At Newark airport, I climbed into a taxi. Wearing my uniform with all my ribbons and my Vietnamese airborne beret, I kept waiting for the driving to make a big fuss and exclaim "Hey! You're just back from Vietnam, aren't you!" Nothing. So I fed him hints like, "Gee, I haven't seen Newark for a while." But he dropped me at my mother's place with scarcely a word... I was pretty disoriented. I couldn't think about anything but Vietnam. The war was all over the newspapers, but people seemed not to care. Even when Mom introduced me to a few of her friends, they only said things like, "Well, I guess now you'll be able to get on with your life." No one wanted to know about Vietnam: the public wasn't caught up in the war, not at all like the spirit I remembered from my boyhood, during World War II. After two days I wanted to run through the streets yelling, "Hey! In Vietnam people are dying! Americans are dying! How can you act like nothing is happening?""

"I had to be a complete son of a bitch to get any results, which often entailed losing my temper five or six times in a day. Being calm and reasonable just didn't work. For one thing the antiwar protests were mounting in the United States and a lot of our draftees knew they'd been sent to an unpopular war and didn't want to fight. Then there was the Army's policy of keeping Vietnam tours to one year, which meant a constant stream of raw recruits and a constant exodus of experienced men. When these new kids arrived, they'd immediately be exposed to a bogus combat-veteran culture that was in reality no more than an accumulation of bad habits. Some other troops would tell them: "Forget that crap you learned in basic training. This is how we do it around here. This is the real thing.""

"My view of the Vietcong never changed. I saw them as opportunistic brigands who with guns and encouragement from the North Vietnamese oppressed the peasants, stole their money and crops, and bullied them into cooperation. I'd have loved to fight a full-scale battle against the Phantom 48th. We had a competent battalion staff and I was quite confident we could have outmaneuvered and destroyed them. But the war had degenerated by then into piecemeal engagements that played to our weaknesses: our shortage of capable junior officers and NCOS, and our draftees' reluctance to fight."

"I took the red-eye out of San Francisco to Baltimore/Washington International Airport on Thursday, July 23, 1970. As we made our final approach early on Friday morning, we flew straight into a thunderstorm. Wind buffeted the plane, lightning flashed, and just as we reached the runway I watched the right wing outside my window dip sickeningly toward the ground. "Great," I thought, "Ive survived two tours in Vietnam and I'm gonna crash here in front of my wife.""

"I hate to think what my life would have been like if I hadn't had Brenda to come back to after Vietnam. I'd read about Kent State and the antiwar upheavals that spring- at Oberlin, my sister Ruth had organized a workshop to make placards for demonstrations. I'd also heard about antiwar protestors spitting on soldiers. I'd made up my mind even before coming home that I'd punch out anybody who spit on me. Luckily, no one did. But one day that fall, I stopped at a mall in Virginia after work wearing my green uniform. I walked into a department store, and salespeople and other shoppers glared at me. I paid and left as quickly as possible, but getting into the car I thought, "I am in the nation's capital, wearing the uniform of the United States Army, and the people around me see me as some kind of monster!" The mood of the country had turned ugly."

"Look across that generation gap now and see it as they see it—the young. Thirty two billion dollars into a civil war ten thousand miles from our shore to protect the freedom of the South Vietnamese and keep the Viet Cong from attacking San Francisco. That’s where we are told is America’s destiny—in the rice paddies of DaNang. And America’s youth—or at least a sizeable share of them—find this to be patently unbelievable. America’s destiny, in their view, lies on the streets of Newark, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and Harlem. That’s where we keep alive the dream. Not in Saigon. And certainly not at the cost of twenty-thousand dead American boys with a hundred-thousand wounded and a half a million civilians put to a torch. Again, the inconsistencies. The Hawks who bleat most loudly for our continuing participation in this war—these are the ones who’ve passed the propositions 14—and woe be unto the oriental who has the temerity to put a garbage can next to his. Again inconsistency. Those who shout loudest for fiscal sanity—an end to so-called federal handouts. Stop this nonsense about Federal Aid to education, federal housing, aid to cities. These are the gentlemen who watched us throw two billion dollars to help prop up the French Colonial Government whose good offices are indistinguishable from the North Vietnamese."

"Patton asked him to go aboard a chopper equipped with a loudspeaker and order his men to surrender. The prisoner quickly refused, and Patton said to him, "If you don't go up in the chopper with me and ask them to surrender you have personally signed their death warrants, because I will be forced to obliterate this position." The NVA captain again declined, and Patton's frustration was evident. He glowered at the man, and said, "Goddamn it, who is winning this war?" "You are," was the reply. "Then in that case," Patton shouted, "why don't we save the lives of your soldiers and let us take them out and feed them and medicate them?" "Sir," he said, "you didn't ask who would win this war." "Well, who is going to win this war?" Patton snorted. "We will," the prisoner said forcefully, "because you will tire of it before we do.""

"However, the most cruel mistake occurred with the failure to understand the Vietnam war. Some people sincerely wanted all wars to stop just as soon as possible; others believed that there should be room for national, or communist, self-determination in Vietnam, or in Cambodia, as we see today with particular clarity. But members of the U.S. anti-war movement wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there. Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear?"

"Only a few days after the Ia Drang, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was back at the division base camp at An Khe on a cold and rainy Thanksgiving. Lieutenant Colonel Robert McDade, the battalion commander, met a visiting Westmoreland near the mess hall and told him that everyone was just about ready to eat their Thanksgiving dinners. But Westmoreland told him, "Get them all together and let me talk to them." The troops had been issued a hot meal, real coffee instead of the powdered stuff that came with C-Rations, turkey, and the trimmings. They were walking back to their squad tents to enjoy this special repast when the order was given to assemble. "There stood General Westmoreland himself," said Sergeant John Setelin. "He made a speech there in the rain and while he talked we watched the rain turn that hot dinner into cold Mulligan stew. Who knew what the hell the man said? Who cared?""

"Got in a little hometown jam So they put a rifle in my hand Sent me off to a foreign land To go and kill the yellow man"

"What the world (and particularly the White House) needs to remember is that aggression is unleashed and escalated when one party to a dispute decides for itself who is guilty and how he is to be punished. This is what is happening in Cyprus, where we have been begging Greeks and Turks to desist from the murderous escalation of reprisal and counter reprisal. Johnson practices in Southeast Asia what he deplores in the Mediterranean.... The U.S. now seems to operate on the principle that invasion of other people's skies is our right, and efforts to interfere with it (at least by weaker powers) punishable by reprisal. This is pure "might is right" doctrine..."

"Even in wartime, reprisals are supposed to be kept within narrow limits. Hackworth's Digest, the State Department's huge Talmud of international law, quotes an old War Department manual, Rules of Land Warfare... says reprisals are never to be taken "merely for revenge" but "only as an unavoidable last resort" to "enforce the recognized rules of civilized warfare." Even then reprisals "should not be excessive or exceed the degree of violence committed by the enemy." These were the principles we applied at the Nuremberg trials. Our reprisal raids on North Vietnam hardly conformed to these standards. By our own account, in self-defense, we had already sunk three or four attacking torpedo boats in two incidents. In neither were our ships damaged nor any of our men hurt; indeed, one bullet imbedded in one destroyer hull is the only proof we have been able to muster that the second of the attacks even took place. To fly sixty-four bombing sorties in reprisal over four North Vietnamese bases and an oil depot, destroying or damaging twenty-five North Vietnamese PT boats, a major part of that tiny navy, was hardly punishment to fit the crime...."

"Morse revealed that U.S. warships were on patrol in Tonkin Bay nearby during the shelling of two islands off the North Vietnamese coast on Friday, July 31, by South Vietnamese vessels. Morse said our warships were within three to eleven miles of North Vietnamese territory, at the time, although North Vietnam claims a twelve-mile limit. Morse declared that the U.S. "knew that the bombing was going to take place...[and] charged that the presence of our warships was "bound to be looked upon by our enemies as an act of provocation.""

"As one of our interviewers... says... once you kill a sitting president in high noon in Dealey Plaza and blow his head off, you're not going to go back to normal... After Kennedy was killed, and nobody asked... what was Kennedy's real policy on Vietnam? Well... he was going to pull out of Vietnam. He was very clear about it, and that's what people get confused. Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, who took over the office went right to war quickly. He went to a far more aggressive posture of Vietnam, which resulted in more-- It was a lie, another lie, and that war was a disaster... Unfortunately, the same forces that made that war happen continued in our life, and they controlled us and pushed us into another war and another war and another war... we propagandize an enemy, make him far bigger than he is, and I don't know what we're fighting. We're just fighting because the military needs to keep going and needs to be funded..."

"In writing to President Johnson in December 1965 about his intention to make a film about the Green Berets, John Wayne explained that it was “extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there . . . The most effective way to accomplish this is through the motion picture medium.” He thought he could make the “kind of picture that will help our cause throughout the world.” According to Wayne, it would “tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam with reason, emotion, characterization, and action. We want to do it in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow Americans—a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during times of stress and trouble.” Unlike earlier wars, however, the Vietnam War did not unite the nation to a common cause, but tore it apart. Michael Wayne, who produced the film for his father’s company, claimed that The Green Berets did not tell a controversial story: “It was the story of a group of guys who could have been in any war. It’s a very familiar story. War stories are all the same. They are personal stories about soldiers and the background is the war. This just happened to be the Vietnam War.” On its part, the White House willingly embraced the project. Jack Valenti, then an advisor to President Johnson, advised him that while John Wayne’s politics might be wrong, “insofar as Vietnam is concerned, his views are right. If he made the picture, he would say the things we want said.” Wayne himself freely admitted he was doing more than playing his usual soldier role. He saw the movie as “an American film about American boys who were heroes over there. In that sense, it was propaganda.” Of all the filmmakers in Hollywood, whether Hawk or Dove, only Wayne was willing to take a financial gamble and make a movie about an increasingly unpopular war. But The Green Berets did not inspire other filmmakers to use Vietnam as a subject for war movies. In fact, until 1975, no one in Hollywood seriously considered producing a major theatrical film about the Vietnam conflict."

"In coming to the Pentagon with his plans in May 1975, Coppola told Public Affairs officials that his initial script would need considerable work, especially the end, which he considered “surrealistic.” While recognizing that the screenplay had considerable problems, the officials forwarded it to the Army with the recommendation that the service should work with the director so that the completed film “will be an honest presentation.” The Army found little basis to even talk to Coppola, responding that the script was “simply a series of some of the worst things, real or imagined, that happened or could have happened during the Vietnam War.” According to the service, it had little reason to consider extending cooperation “in view of the sick humor or satirical philosophy of the film.” Army officers pointed to several “particularly objectionable episodes” which presented its actions “in an unrealistic and unacceptable bad light.” These included scenes of U.S. soldiers scalping the enemy, a surfing display in the midst of combat, an officer obtaining sexual favors for his men, and later smoking marijuana with them. The military probably could have lived with at least some of these negative incidents if put in what it regarded as a realistic and balanced context. But, from the initial script onward, the Army strongly objected to the film’s springboard which has Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) sent to “terminate with extreme prejudice” Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who has set up an independent operation and is waging a private war against all sides. The Army said Kurtz’s actions “can only be viewed as a parody on the sickness and brutality of war.” The service maintained that in an actual situation, it would attempt to bring Kurtz back for medical treatment rather than order another officer to “terminate” him. Consequently, the Army said that “to assist in any way in the production would imply agreement with either the fact or philosophy of the film.”"

"When I arrived in country, my battalion had been in heavy fighting for weeks. There was only one platoon sergeant left in the entire rifle company, which usually had four or five E7's. I was only an E-6, but immediately became a platoon sergeant. We were in contact every day. The heavy casualties continued, and we received new "fills" of riflemen right out of Basic every four to five days. But you can't replace experienced troops or NCOs like that without destroying unit cohesion, morale, and competency. To clear the enemy out of the Delta, the 9th Division needed to be pulled out, rebuilt, and replaced by at least two American divisions, but that wasn't going to happen. So, the young men in the 9th were left down there to bleed and die. It was truly tragic."

"After nine months, I was wounded by shrapnel in my knee and back from an RPG and sent to the rear area. They wanted to reassign me to a mechanized unit, but I wouldn't have that. I wanted to go back to the Riverine Force. Someone else had my job by then, so they put me in a different regiment, but still leg infantry. While all that was going on, they lost my paperwork. Rather than sending me home after my last three months, my new regiment thought I was new in country, and I ended up staying for another ten months. I didn't say anything, because I hated to leave those kids out there on their own with no leadership."

"You know you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American colonel. The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."

"I am the mother of two Vietnam vets. One returned and one didn't. The one who didn't was my youngest son, just twenty-two. He wasn't drafted- he enlisted "because the world needs to be a better place and I promised Walter if anything happened to him I would fill his place." Walter, his best friend, was killed in Vietnam at seventeen years of age. I know the outrage these men feel because I, too, was questioned about my sons being in an "unjust war"- once the day he was buried, and other times smugly by parents whose boys avoided the call of their country."

"I have been among the officers who have said that a large land war in Asia is the last thing we should undertake. Most of us, when we use that term, are thinking about getting into a land war against Red China. That's the only power in Asia which would require us to use forces in very large numbers. I was slow in joining with those who recommended the introduction of ground forces in South Vietnam. But it became perfectly clear that because of the rate of infiltration from North Vietnam to South Vietnam something had to be done."

"The acceptance of the legitimacy of the overt use of power comes hard in some segments of our citizenship. In some of the expressions of concern over our behavior in Vietnam, we are seeing curious aspects of our national character in this regard. They often contain a note of reluctance or of regret over the use of the vast power represented by the resources of the United States at home and abroad. In some quarters there seems to even be what amounts to a certain feeling of guilt arising from our possession of this power and an uneasiness about the morality of our conduct. One consequence of this attitude in the Vietnam situation is that our government must constantly defend its actions to critics and, in so doing, is often obliged to disclose its plans and purposes to a degree which must be vastly helpful to our opponents. Inevitably in a situation such as Vietnam, where we are using limited means to gain limited ends, it is essential to keep the adversary in doubt with regard to the full scope of our intentions."

"Elements of the information media contributed to prolonging the war by their manner of reporting the news. It required only selective reporting, not deliberate fabrication, to create the impression that we Americans were the prime aggressors bent on expanding the war to avoid impending defeat, and that our alleged successes were really defeats which officials were trying to hide from the American public. Biased reporters found no good to say about our Vietnamese allies, whom they held up to scorn in a way which led the American people to believe that our allies were not worth the sacrifices we were making in their behalf. Such selective and slanted reporting spread defeatism among the tender-minded at home and provided enormous encouragement for Hanoi to hold fast and concede nothing."

"Of course, the media did not have to manufacture dissent and antiwar feeling in the United States; there was enough of the real article to provide them with legitimate subject matter. Every war critic capable of producing a headline contributed, in proportion to his eminence, some comfort if not aid to the enemy. Unfortunately, from 1967 onward there was no shortage of eminent figures among the opponents of the war willing to make this contribution."

"We are carrying into the next decade many unresolved problems raised by Vietnam. How can a democracy such as ours defend its interests at acceptable cost and continue to enjoy the freedom of speech and behavior to which we are accustomed in time of peace? To a Communist enemy the Cold War is a total, unending conflict with the United States and its allies- without formal military hostilities, to be sure- but conducted with the same discipline and determination as a formal war. Unless we can learn to exercise some degree of self-discipline, to accept and enforce some reasonable standard of responsible civic conduct, and to remove the many self-created obstacles to the use of our power, we will be unable to meet the hard competition waiting for us in the decade of the 1970s."

"We all have a share in it, and none of it is good. There are no heroes, just bums. I include myself in that."

"First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies. We never understood them, and that was another surprise. And we knew even less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this dirty kind of business. It's very dangerous."

"Along the road, I saw a situation of disorder and chaos unlike anything I have ever seen before. Aircraft were taking off from the airfield like bees from a shattered beehive. In the river, navy vessels were casting off and setting sail, squadron by squadron. The streets were crowded with vehicles of every description trying to move in all directions. Panicked people ran about trying to find their loved ones. Cars, bicycles, and motorcycles weaved in and out, each trying to push ahead with total disregard for the rules of the road and our traffic laws. Taking advantage of this situation, bad elements surfaced, committing robberies in the streets and looting U.S. offices and private residences belonging to families that had already evacuated. The truck convoy carrying my division headquarters had a great deal of difficulty making it to the corps headquarters, and did not arrive there until 1600 in the afternoon."

"Vietnam is clear, representing another of the tragedies of capitalism. Young men left the U.S.A., traveling 10,000 miles to a country they had never heard of before, actually believing they were sacrificing their lives to advance democracy, to advance history, when in fact they were fighting against themselves."

"Throughout the war, the results of the bombing of North Vietnam have consistently fallen far short of the claims made for it. The bombing began with the expectation that it would break the will of the enemy—although many questioned its capability to do so. When Hanoi showed no signs of weakening, the rationale shifted toward interdiction, but this goal, too, proved unobtainable. Many suggested that this failure was because there were too many restrictions. If such targets as the North's petroleum facilities were attacked, it was argued, Hanoi's capabilities would be sharply reduced. But again North Vietnam proved capable of adapting; the will of the Hanoi leadership held strong. Again bombing failed to fulfill the promises made for it."

"...it is clear that the Paris Agreement did not bring peace to the people of Vietnam. This was because this agreement was not the result of real peace talks; rather, its primary purpose was to implement a "secret" exchange between the two emissaries, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. This exchange would allow North Vietnam to keep troops in South Vietnam and later to take over the country by force of arms. In return, the United States would receive a number of prisoners of war, be allowed to look for Americans missing in action, and be free to withdraw its troops who still remained in South Vietnam in accordance with Richard Nixon's stated goal of "Peace with Honor." In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu had blind and insane confidence in the promises made by President Nixon, so he did not take any precautions. This meant that, in the end, South Vietnam was left helpless when the United States decided to ignore the North Vietnamese communist violations of the Paris Agreement. Today, more than thirty years later, because the content of the "secret talks" between Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger is still not known, people still do not know whether the help the United States gave North Vietnam and the VC was intentional or unintentional, but it sacrificed South Vietnam by refusing to intervene when the communists violated the agreement and by cutting military aid. In the end, South Vietnam got no peace and the United States got no honor. In any case, President Nguyen Van Thieu's dictatorial policies, both foreign and domestic, were a complete failure, even during the nation's most dangerous hours. In the end, the Republic of Vietnam was destroyed at the end of April 1975, surprising our opponents and causing a powerful shock to many nations throughout the world."

"With respect to North Vietnam's conquest of the Republic of Vietnam, North Vietnam had initially projected that it would take two years for it to implement its plan to capture South Vietnam. In 1975, the North Vietnamese planned to cut South Vietnam in half and then create conditions to allow for the unification of North and South Vietnam in 1976. In fact, ironically, the North Vietnamese captured all of South Vietnam during the spring of 1975, in the space of less than two months. No one ever anticipated that it would take North Vietnam only fifty-five days- beginning on 10 March 1975 when its troops crossed the Vietnamese-Cambodian border to attack Ban Me Thuot and ending on 30 April 1975, the day the unconstitutional President Duong Van Minh announced an unconditional surrender at 1015 in the morning, after a little over two days in office as president. As soon as Duong Van Minh made this announcement, North Vietnamese and VC troops advanced straight into Saigon with virtually no opposition, because almost all our troops deployed into defensive positions laid down their arms following General Minh's orders, and then escaped rather than trust their lives to the communists."

"During the final ten days, from 21 to 30 April 1975, South Vietnam was like a headless chicken. President Nguyen Van Thieu suddenly abandoned his post at the last minute. New president Tran Van Huong, who was not protected by the constitution of the Republic of Vietnam, did nothing during the few days he was in power other than argue about the powers of his presidency. The few houses of the RVN Parliament did not respect the constitution and betrayed the nation. The unconstitutional President Duong Van Minh, out of blind faith in the "Tripartite Government" solution, demanded that he be given the post of chief of state one more time. However, just like the last time he was chief of state, General Minh did not have a firm understanding of the situation and did not have the capacity to resolve major problems. Even more damaging, General Minh was tricked by the North Vietnamese communists and the VC into complete immobility at the end. Acting like a defeated general, at 1015 in the morning of 30 April 1975 General Minh ordered ARVN units to lay down their arms. After SUpreme Commander Duong Van Minh issued the order to surrender, most of the ARVN soldiers assigned to defend the capital city put down their weapons, but they refused to lower their heads and surrender to the communists. They disbanded on their own, taking off their uniforms and disguising themselves as civilians in order to escape rather than to submit to being arrested and humiliated by the communists. A number of heroic soldiers, out of anger or out of humiliation, committed suicide before the communist army entered Saigon. One shining example was Lieutenant Colonel Long, a police officer, who committed suicide in front of the South Vietnamese National Assembly building after receiving the surrender order. In IV Corps, even though our army was still in control of the situation and Major General Nguyen Khoa Nam still had three elite infantry divisions, along with navy and air force units, under his command, all of South Vietnam was delivered into the hands of the North Vietnamese communists. The North Vietnamese then disbanded the NLFSVN."

"It is regrettable that the role of the RVN soldier had been smeared by certain American media and by the propaganda machine of the communists during the war. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, thirty years after the defeat of the Americans and the Vietnamese, right in Washington, D.C., the truth about the Vietnam War is still distorted. Indeed the daily Viet Nam Moi (New Vietnam) announced on 9 October 2004: "In an interview on September 29, 2004, Bill O'Reilly from Fox News asked President George W. Bush about the Vietnam War. O'Reilly: 'The South Vietnamese didn't fight for their freedom, which is why they don't have it today.' It was ironic to hear the President's reply: 'Yes.'""

"“Hue was one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam war, both in terms of its human cost as well as the amount of physical destruction it generated,” says Erik Villard of the US Army Centre of Military History, who specialises in the Vietnam war. The citadel of Hue, widely regarded as the cultural capital of Vietnam, became the key battleground in 25 days of urban warfare which raged within its walls, gardens and moats. According to Villard, 216 US servicemen and 421 South Vietnamese troops were killed in the action, and some 1,600 US soldiers and 2,100 South Vietnamese wounded. North Vietnamese losses were estimated at 2,500 to 5,000."

"Fifty years ago, this picturesque area where today tourists snap selfies was the scene of intense bombardment; many of the walls and gatehouses have been reduced to little more than rubble. As US and South Vietnamese forces sought to penetrate the citadel and evict the insurgents, efforts were made to restrict the degree of damage inflicted on the Imperial Palace. “US forces used artillery, naval gunfire and an occasional air strike to suppress the enemy on the outer wall, but could do nothing about the snipers in the Imperial Palace because the royal residence was a no-fire zone,” says Villard."

"On both sides of the road over 50 percent of the people's houses were destroyed. There wasn't a shadow of a human, and no animals. It was cold, and all was ruined and destroyed. In truth it was a dead city."

"The Vietnamese struggle is the most significant political event of our generation. Understanding the history of the Vietnam war is a key to understand the present world situation, the present US governmental crisis, the present possibilities for the revolutionary movement here, and a correct anti-imperialist perspective."

"I was a junior in high school in 1968, during the Tet Offensive. The disaster of Tet marked the beginning of the end of American public support for the war, as was apparent even in the small private high school I attended. Although most of my peers were the children of well-heeled, conservative civilians, they were rapidly shedding their willingness to automatically rubber-stamp those values. I, however, was a steadfast Teenage Republican, and gave a speech for Richard Nixon in our school's mock elections that fall. Later the same year I passionately defended the Vietnam War before my speech class, keenly aware that my classmates, most of them apolitical or liberal, could not have seen me as more alien if I'd leaped off a Huey (helicopter gunship) into their midst."

"In the fall of 1969, barely a month after I arrived on campus for my freshman year, word spread of a huge peace demonstration planned in Washington, D.C., just a few hours away. The night before the demonstration, one of my civilian friends spotted me on campus and shouted, "Come on! We've got a van going to D.C. and there's just enough room for you! Hurry up!" To my friend's consternation, I refused. "Why not?" he asked in disbelief, stopping in his tracks. I had told no one of the conflict that tormented me. Yes I was against the war, but no I was not antimilitary. Yes I wanted to protest, but no I didn't want to condemn country and military wholesale. What would it mean to lend my presence to a huge, historic demonstration that would only be read one way? My friend searched my face for an answer. "I can't go," I finally told him, "because armbands only come in black, not in shades of gray." He stared at me blankly, then shook his head and ran off to join the caravan."

"Military brats during the Vietnam War covered the whole spectrum of opinion, from those wholly supporting the war, to those wholly condemning it, to those who declined to take a position. What I believe all had in common, however, was a sensitivity to the real human beings serving in the military who were swept into the hell that was Vietnam. The children of warriors did not find it easy to swallow the caricature of the military as a monolithic, inhuman juggernaut thriving on death and destruction. We all knew someone who had served there, someone who had died there. For us the warriors were not faceless and inhuman: They were our fathers, our brothers, our cousins. We could not condemn them. And that point alone was enough to divide us from our many civilian peers."

"One thing I believe all of us children of the Fortress sensed in our gut: The opposition to the war was too simplistic. It condemned too broadly, too blackly. Where it should have focused clearly on national policy and those who shaped it, the movement blindly condemned those charged to carry out the war, who had little freedom to refuse. It is true that there were individuals in the military who did refuse, and who accepted the consequences. Where these acts were morally driven, it is possible to say those individuals were courageously obeying a higher law. But it was and is unrealistic to imagine an entire armed force laying down its weapons in mutiny against an unpalatable foreign policy. And it is purely fanciful to imagine that soldiers should pick and choose the wars they wish to fight; that's the last thing any country would want, for nation-states depend absolutely on their warriors to do as they are commanded without question or hesitation. Therefore to condemn wholesale hundreds of thousands of soldiers who did not desert or mutiny but went, as ordered, into the nightmare of the Vietnam War, is not only to misplace the blame, but to lack compassion. On this point military brats of both Right and Left stand united."

"After 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers slipped into the poorly guarded city of Hue in February of 1968, it took a month of intense fighting, principally by American Marines, to root them out. One reason was gross negligence by the high command in estimating the enemy’s strength. A deeper reason was the physical reality of urban density, trapped civilians, stout houses, and massive stonewalls. There was no avoiding house-to-house fighting to force back a determined enemy. In terms of total fatalities among friendly and enemy troops and civilians, the result was, to quote Bowden, “well over ten thousand, making it by far the bloodiest [battle] of the Vietnam War.”"

"The enemy had achieved in South Vietnam neither military nor psychological victory. For the South Vietnamese the Tet offensive served as a unifying catalyst, a Pearl Harbor. Had it been the same for the American people, had President Johnson discerned the same support behind him that Thieu did behind him, and had he acted with forcefulness, the enemy could have been induced to engage in serious and meaningful negotiations. Unfortunately, the enemy scored in the United States the psychological victory that eluded him in Vietnam, so influencing President Johnson and his civilian advisors that they ignored the maxim that when the enemy is hurting, you don't diminish the pressure, you increase it."

"As any television viewer or newspaper reader could discern the end in South Vietnam, in April 1975, came with incredible suddenness, amid scenes of unmitigated misery and shame. Utter defeat, panic, and rout have produced similar demoralizing tableaux through the centuries; yet to those of us who had worked so hard and long to try to keep it from ending that way, who had been so markedly conscious of the deaths and wounds of thousands of Americans and the soldiers of other countries, who had so long stood in awe of the stamina of the South Vietnamese soldier and civilian under the mantle of hardship, it was depressingly sad that so much misery should be a part of it. So immense had been the sacrifices made through so many long years that the South Vietnamese deserved an end- if it had to come to that- with more dignity to it."

"In the renewed war in South Vietnam beginning in the late 1950s, the considerable success that Giap and the Viet Cong enjoyed was cut short by the introduction of American troops. In the face of American airpower, helicopter mobility, and fire support, there was no way Giap could win on the battlefield. Given the restrictions they had imposed on themselves, neither was there much chance that the Americans and South Vietnamese could win a conventional victory; but so long as American troops were involved, Giap could point to few battlefield successes more spectacular or meaningful than the occasional overrunning of a fire-support base. Yet Giap persisted nevertheless in a big-unit war in which his losses were appalling, as evidenced by his admission to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he had by early 1969 lost half a million men killed. Ruthless disregard for losses is seldom seen as military genius. A Western commander absorbing losses on the scale of Giap's would have hardly lasted in command more than a few weeks."

"Forced in January 1973 by American pressure to to accept a cease-fire agreement that left well over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops inside South Vietnam and free access for tens of thousands more, South Vietnamese leaders surely had reason to believe that if their enemy seriously violated the agreement, the United States would interfere. Yet that was not to be. In the face of that grave psychological blow for the South Vietnamese, it required no military genius to assure South Vietnam's eventual military defeat."

"Ironically, the North Vietnamese victory could have come much sooner. In view of the increasing commitment of American troops in the mid- and late 1960s, General Giap would have been well advised to abandon the big-unit war, pull in his horns to take away the visible threat to South Vietnam's survival, and thereby delude the Americans that they had already achieved their goal of making the South Vietnamese self-sufficient. President Johnson had given Giap that chance at the Manila conference of 1966 when he had announced that once "the level of violence subsides," American and other foreign troops would withdraw within six months. That would have been eight years before the eventual South Vietnamese defeat, long before the South Vietnamese armed forces would have had any claim to self-sufficiency. Making that offer at the Manila conference may well have been an effort by President Johnson to rid himself of the albatross of South Vietnam, whatever the long-range consequences. For once the United States had pulled out under those circumstances and Giap had come back, what American President would have dared risk the political pitfalls involved in putting American troops back in?"

"Dating from the days of the Geneva Accords of 1954, the refugees always flowed south, not north, and even those Americans who long maintained that the refugees were not fleeing the enemy but American shelling and bombing would have to admit that even after American shelling and bombing stopped, the flow was still always southward. So it was until the final deplorable end. How could anyone genuinely believe that the South Vietnamese people had no desire to forestall the march of totalitarianism, to maintain their freedom- however imperfect- when for years upon years they bore incredible hardships and their soldiers fought with courage and determination to do just that? They carried on the fight under a government that many Americans labeled unrepresentative, repressive, and corrupt. No people could have pursued such a grim defensive fight for so long without a deep underlying yearning for freedom."

"Pro-lifers’ reactions against the Vietnam War pushed the movement further to the left. In the early years of the movement, opponents of abortion, most of whom were staunchly anticommunist, had been reluctant to say anything against the nation’s military effort in Vietnam. They were New Deal liberals and advocates of the civil rights movement, but in the mid-1960s, they hesitated to link themselves to a radical student cause that would put them at odds with their nation’s government and with some of the nation’s highest-ranking Catholic clerics, including New York archbishop Cardinal Francis Spellman, who had endorsed the war as a necessity in the fight against Communism. Indeed, one of the leading pro-life books of the late 1960s, Charles E. Rice’s The Vanishing Right to Live, explicitly condemned those who refused to serve in Vietnam. But by the end of the decade, some pro-lifers concluded that if they valued human life before birth, they also needed to protect the lives of those already born and join the campaign against the war. After Fr. James McHugh, founder of the National Right to Life Committee and director of the bishops’ Family Life Bureau, included a discussion of the ethics of war in the model homily on abortion that he sent to the nation’s Catholic priests in January 1969, an increasing number of pro-lifers began talking about the injustice of the war in Vietnam, as well as the arms race. The definitive antiabortion publication of 1970, a 500-page tome by Georgetown philosophy professor Germain Grisez, condemned the nuclear arms race as unethical and questioned the morality of the Vietnam War, saying that it “poses many problems from an ethical point of view”. Despite conservative Catholics’ initial reluctance to issue an unmitigated condemnation of the war, denunciations of the nation’s military effort in Vietnam became widespread in the pro-life movement by 1972. “We cannot be selective in our love for life,” Detroit’s archbishop, Cardinal John Dearden, declared in September 1972. “The very same reasons call on us to protect it wherever and however it is threatened, whether through the suffocation of poverty or in villages ravaged by napalm or unborn life in a mother’s womb”."

"In 1969, while on medical leave from Vietnam, I took my mother up the road to have lunch and to get reacquainted. When we got up to pay and leave the fellow in the next booth got up and blocked our path. This was not a hippie or some punk protester- this was a man in his thirties, blue-collar worker, probably married and with one or two kids of his own. He insisted on informing me that I wasn't a real soldier and I didn't know what war was because he had fought in Korea! He said anyone could get a Purple Heart now just for the asking, and that the three I now wore were bullshit. This man, supposedly the mainstay of our country, was prepared to start a fight at 2 o'clock in the afternoon in a restaurant. Who the hell was this guy? I didn't know him, had never met him, nor done anything to him. Was the whole country being brainwashed? It was then and is now beyond my power to describe the anger and hatred I felt then, and still feel today. What intelligent people we have bred that they can be led by the nose by whoever makes the most noise! As disappointing as I'm sure it must be to some, I am not some neurotic vet desecrating society every time I'm released from the psych ward of the local VA. In fact I'm married with three kids (none of them neurotic either), a $100,000 home in the suburbs, and my own company. My feelings are still strong and buried just slightly below the surface. Today I do business with a great many of these same people who symbolically, if not physically, spit on us when we came home from Vietnam. They think I'm a great guy. I don't boast about my service time, yet I don't hide it, either. I wait with patience hoping that some day these very same people will have the opportunity to burn in hell while I laugh."

"You put the government on the spot when you even mention Vietnam. They feel embarrassed — you notice that?... It's just a trap that they let themselves get into. … But they're trapped, they can't get out. You notice I said 'they.' They are trapped, They can't get out. If they pour more men in, they'll get deeper. If they pull the men out, it's a defeat. And they should have known that in the first place. France had about 200,000 Frenchmen over there, and the most highly mechanized modern army sitting on this earth. And those little rice farmers ate them up, and their tanks, and everything else. Yes, they did, and France was deeply entrenched, had been there a hundred or more years. Now, if she couldn't stay there and was entrenched, why, you are out of your mind if you think Sam can get in over there. But we're not supposed to say that. If we say that, we're anti-American, or we're seditious, or we're subversive…. They put Diem over there. Diem took all their money, all their war equipment and everything else, and got them trapped. Then they killed him. Yes, they killed him, murdered him in cold blood, him and his brother, Madame Nhu's husband, because they were embarrassed. They found out that they had made him strong and he was turning against them…. You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer is in bad shape…."

"The Soviet Union hastened to endorse the Bandung principles, and the United States began to ease its hostility toward nonalignment (which Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had denounced as "morally bankrupt"), acknowledge the diminishing appeal of its security pacts, and court independent Third World governments. Vietnam was an exception. The Eisenhower administration, which had refused to sign the Geneva Accords, feared a communist victory in the national elections and a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. After the French withdrawal, the United States proceeded to build up a client state in the south, allowing President Ngô Đình Diệm to cancel the 1956 elections and to clamp down on his opponents. Contrary to the Geneva Accords, which forbade the Vietnamese from entering foreign alliances or allowing foreign troops into Vietnam, Dulles mobilized the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization to agree to protect South Vietnam against communist aggression. When a popular insurgency, which Diệm contemptuously labeled Viet Cong (Vietnamese communists) erupted in the south two years later and received support from the north, Eisenhower expanded US economic and military aid and personnel on the ground. Between 1955 and 1961 the United States poured more than $1 billion in economic and military aid into the Diệm regime, and by the time Eisenhower left office there were approximately one thousand US military advisers in South Vietnam."

"The US intervention in Vietnam was not inevitable. It evolved from the vacuum left by the collapse of Japan's Asian Empire, followed by the communists' victory in China, the Korean stalemate, and France's defeat in 1954. But it also grew out of the Cold War decisions of three US presidents: Truman's to move away from Roosevelt's anticolonialism and back the French, Eisenhower's to block the Vietnamese national elections in 1956 and prop up the Diệm regime, and Kennedy's to increase the number of US military advisers, Special Forces, and CIA agents in South Vietnam. All three intended to transform Vietnam into a "proving ground for democracy in Asia.""

"Three months before the presidential election Johnson had already obtained his justification for going to war. From the beginning of 1964 the US military had taken over direction of the CIA/South Vietnamese covert commando attacks against North Vietnam as well as naval intelligence gathering in the coastal areas (known as DESOTO patrols). On August 1, 1964, shortly after a South Vietnamese commando attack on two islands, the destroyer Maddox entered the Gulf of Tonkin for the purpose of collecting electronic intelligence. The next day, as it approached the island of Hon Me, it encountered three North Vietnamese torpedo boats whose signals had been intercepted. The Maddox fired, damaging only one of them. Two days later, the Maddox, now joined by a second intelligence vessel, C. Turner Joy, again fired on what appeared to be approaching enemy ships, although no evidence has ever been found of a second North Vietnamese interception."

"Although neither US ship had been hit and there were no casualties, Johnson immediately ordered a retaliatory bombing raid against North Vietnamese naval bases. Evoking America's dread of surprise assaults, Johnson appealed for public support against an "unprovoked attack" in international waters. After Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assured Congress that the US Navy had "played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any," Johnson on August 7, 1964 won near-unanimous Senate approval for a resolution authorizing him to use US military force to defend the freedom of South Vietnam, a measure his administration had prepared earlier in the spring. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution enabled Johnson to spurn proposals that fall for another Geneva conference to achieve a negotiated settlement over Vietnam."

"Shortly after his overwhelming electoral victory, Johnson moved quickly to rescue South Vietnam from an imminent collapse. In 1965 he launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, and by the end of the year he had dispatched 180,000 combat troops as well. Although this dramatic escalation contained several cautious elements, Johnson had transformed South Vietnam into a Cold War struggle and one of the longest and most divisive wars in US history."

"In selecting bombing targets, Johnson avoided destroying North Vietnamese dams and ports and thereby provoking a Chinese intervention although the Ho Ch Minh Trail was bombed, Johnson made no moves to invade Laos or attack the Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia; and US forces confined themselves to search-and-destroy operations against enemy units and largely refrained from involvement in local politics."

"The US involvement in Vietnam had a major effect on global politics. Antiwar movements developed rapidly in America, with young people burning their draft cards, fleeing the country, or serving jail sentences rather than go to Vietnam. By October 1965 protest demonstrations in forty American cities had spread to Europe and Asia. Critics of the war condemned America's atrocities against the civilian population- North and South- and its use of chemical weapons, and they called for an immediate US withdrawal. Antiwar activists derided Washington's claim of battling Chinese communism to save Asians from tyranny, and deplored America's opposition to the third World's struggle for independence. To the generation raised after World War II and the Holocaust, America's claim to defend freedom against a tiny, tenacious people, and its support of a corrupt and repressive puppet government, rang increasingly hollow."

"The conclusion of the Vietnam War underscored the paradox of US-Soviet détente that had been complicated by the emerging US-Sino-Soviet triangle. Although the Superpowers had committed substantial resources to the struggle in Southeast Asia, neither had fully controlled its clients. Both had expected the other to be more accommodating than either was willing to be, or even capable of being. To be sure, Hanoi's victory in 1975 created more diplomatic and economic problems for Moscow as well as for Beijing, while America's defeat- although a severe political and psychological blow- had left its triangular diplomacy unimpaired. Nonetheless, America's war in Vietnam had reinforced the nation's growing conviction that the struggle against global communism must no longer be fought solely by US soldiers."

"Johnson was equally determined to prevent the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, but the price the United States had to pay in lives and money to do so would be much higher than in Latin America. Between November 1963 and July 1965, Johnson transformed Kennedy's program of limited U.S. assistance to South Vietnam into an open-ended commitment to defend that country. By 1968 the United States would have over 500,000 troops in Vietnam. Johnson believed, probably correctly, that South Vietnam would collapse if the United States did not expand its participation in the war. Remembering the conservative backlash against the Truman administration after the communist takeover of China, Johnson believed he could not abandon South Vietnam and remain in the White House. Shortly after assuming the presidency, Johnson said privately, "I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went. If the United States pulled out of Vietnam, Johnson warned on one occasion, "it might as well give up everywhere else- pull out of Berlin, Japan, South America.""

"Although Johnson consulted with congressional leaders before he committed combat units to Vietnam, he did not request another congressional resolution authorizing him to do so. He felt that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution already provided sufficient authorization. Moreover, he did not want to put the country on a war footing, because he feared a public backlash against U.S. involvement in the conflict; he also wanted to maintain congressional and public support for his Great Society reform program, which he feared might be set aside if the war were given priority status. Johnson believed that he could wage war and implement a major reform program simultaneously, something no other president had ever attempted. Ultimately, Johnson's decision to expand the U.S. military commitment in Vietnam would force him to withdraw from the presidential campaign of 1968. The Republican victory in the election that November would mean the end of Johnson's Great Society program as well as the inauguration of a new Vietnam policy."

"One reason for the failure of Johnson's Vietnam policy was the inherent unworkability of U.S. military strategy. The gradual escalation of the U.S. bombing campaign allowed the North Vietnamese sufficient time to disperse their population and resources and to develop an air defense system that would destroy a large number of U.S. aircraft. Moreover, the U.S. Army never developed a consistent strategy for stopping the infiltrations of regular North Vietnamese units and supplies into the South. General Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy was designed primarily to protect the cities of South Vietnam while killing as many Vietcong as possible. Westmoreland grossly miscalculated North Vietnam's willingness to suffer huge losses in manpower as well as its capacity to replace those losses. An estimated 200,000 North Vietnamese males reached draft age each year, far more than U.S. forces could kill. North Vietnam was able to sustain its war effort by drawing on both Soviet and Chinese military and economic assistance. With the Sino-Soviet split deeper than ever, even after Krushchev's demise, both communist powers tried to outdo each other in helping North Vietnam. Their combined assistance between 1965 and 1968 exceeded $2 billion, an amount that more than offset the losses North Vietnam suffered from U.S. bombing. In addition, between 1962 and 1968 approximately 300,000 Chinese soldiers went to North Vietnam, 4,000 of whom were killed. Though not participating in ground combat, they helped operate antiaircraft weapons and communications facilities."

"Without question, the presence of the Chinese military in North Vietnam was largely intended to deter a U.S. invasion, and, clearly, it was successful in doing so. Fearing that an expansion of the ground war into North Vietnam would again bring Chinese soldiers into conflict with U.S. troops, as had happened in the Korean War, the administration refrained from taking that step. Unwilling to fight an all-out war with North Vietnam, Johnson ensured that the conflict would become a war of attrition. In such a war the communists were bound to win because they were willing to accept much higher casualties than were the American people."

"With no prospect of either a military or diplomatic end to the war, the carnage inevitably grew. By late 1967 the number of U.S. military personnel killed in action reached 13,500. Many Americans were wondering if the war was worth the mounting deaths that were so vividly displayed on the nightly news. Slowly, American public opinion turned against the administration. College students in particular became bitter opponents of the war. But the opposition to the conflict also increased in Congress, with Senators William Fulbright (Dem.-Ark.) and Wayne Morse (Rep.-Ore.) leading the attack, bringing to a standstill legislative progress on Johnson's cherished great society program. By 1967 growing demonstrations against the war and vicious personal criticism of the president had made Johnson a virtual prisoner in the White House. The increasing unpopularity of the war, however, did not sway Johnson from his goal of preserving a noncommunist South Vietnam. For the president in 1967, there was no acceptable alternative but a continuation of the war. Accordingly, in August 1967 he approved General Westmoreland's request for an additional 45,000-50,000 troops, but he imposed a new ceiling of 525,000 military personnel, a level that was not surpassed for the remainder of the war. In November 1967 Westmoreland assured Johnson that the United States was "turning the corner" in Vietnam."

"Then, much to the surprise of U.S. intelligence, the supposedly nearly beaten North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a major offensive against the cities of South Vietnam in February 1968. Coinciding with the Vietnamese Tet holiday, the communist forces attacked more than 100 towns and cities, including Saigon, where the grounds of the U.S. Embassy were penetrated, and Huế, the ancient capital of Vietnam, which the communists held for more than a month before they were driven out. While American and South Vietnamese forces were able to repel the communist onslaught, and inflict enormous losses on the enemy in the process, they also suffered heavy casualties. The Tet offensive was a significant military victory for the United States, but it was also a stunning psychological defeat. To most Americans, who had been subjected to repeated administration claims that the war was being won, it seemed incredible that the communists could mount such an impressive offensive."

"After Tet, with no end to the war in sight, a Gallup poll in March 1968 reported that a clear majority of "Middle America" had turned against the administration. The same poll showed that Johnson's approval rating had reached a new low of 30 percent. General Westmoreland seemed oblivious to the growing hostility of the American people and Congress toward the war. He insisted that the communists had been dealt a crippling blow during Tet and that the war could be won by launching new ground offensives against their bases in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, and by intensifying and expanding the bombing campaign, especially around Hanoi and Haiphong. To implement this strategy, Westmoreland requested an additional 206,000 troops."

"Up to about 1965, the dissent expressed in the pages of Christian Century and Christianity and Crisis had been fairly mild. The journals largely supported America’s motive for its presence in Vietnam. Prior to the 1964 presidential election, support for American policy had been consistent. After 1965, editorials began openly to question the escalation carried out by Johnson. They criticized the failure to negotiate, and the impossible conditions expected before negotiations could take place. In the fall of 1965, Christians began to organize more effectively against the war. At that time, the existing dissenting Christian groups were largely composed of pacifists. Further, the newer dissenting groups representing the New Left, were often as willing to overlook violence on the left as they were to reject it on the right. There seemed to be no middle ground. Many Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders sought a way to express their dissent without identifying completely with any of the existing groups."

"Tom Cornell, a leader among the Catholic Worker movement, a friend and veteran of draft card burnings, described draft card burning and the effect of Johnson’s legislation in the movement’s newsletter: In psychological terms it’s a kind of castration symbol and an Oedipal thing. Your kid is flying in the face of authority. . . . There is a kind of civil or state religion which has subsumed large elements of Christianity, Judaism, whatever else there is, and it has its symbols, obviously secular symbols like the flag, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln. It’s subsumed a good part of our traditional real religion. And the draft card then becomes a sacrament. And there’s nothing worse that you can do in sacramental terms than defile a species of the sacrament. And this was a defilement, a real blasphemy against the state."

"In most cases, the major fear behind these restrictions was the fear that controversial issues would lead to conflict and, ultimately, division. Therefore, the Century editor concluded, “most of the Protestant churches stand mindless and mute before the great events which shake the ecclesiastical, cultural and social foundations of our time.” Since Protestants want no one to speak on their behalf, “no one knows whether there is a majority opinion and commitment” about pressing issues. No one knows whether a consensus exists and, if it does, “no one knows whether it is Christian.” He continued: It may be that in the United States Christians are now so thoroughly dispersed in and absorbed by the general fabric of society that it is wholly impossible to obtain a Christian opinion on anything. It may be that the churches are saying nothing about the issues facing the people because as churches they have no mind to speak. . . . If this is the situation we need to know it. Do the churches have anything to say to the world about the world’s affairs that the world cannot say just as well to itself? We need to devise methods of answering this question, even though in the process we run the risk of conflict and division. Better turmoil in the church than total irrelevance."

"Editors at the Century and Christianity and Crisis expressed their opposition to American policies even more strongly as 1965 gave way to 1966. Commonweal increasingly expressed its doubts about the wisdom of the current direction of the war effort. Though none of them called for what might be described as a “precipitous” withdrawal of forces, they insisted on United Nations intervention and unconditional negotiations that would include a significant role for the National Liberation Front (NLF) in a post-war Vietnam. They condemned Johnson’s shift in policy that seemed committed to the mistaken notion of seeking an “all out military victory” in the “undeclared war” in Vietnam. Commonweal reversed its previous support for short-term bombing efforts and joined the other two journals in calling for an immediate stop to all bombing. Meanwhile, Christianity Today and America continued their efforts to encourage American resolve in Vietnam and to defend the continued bombardment of North Vietnam. The war would end the second the aggressors from North Vietnam stopped their aggression. Of these three journals with serious questions about the war, Christianity and Crisis found itself in the most unusual position. Its birth in 1941 came because it opposed Christian isolationism, especially the neutralist and pacifist sentiments so present in the Christian community at the time. Niebuhr and his colleagues at Christianity and Crisis took the lead in providing a strong Christian rationale for American intervention in World War II. But in 1966, they stood absolutely opposed to American military action in Vietnam."

"The dissent against the war that by 1972, became so loud and far-reaching that it helped force America to withdraw, had very little to do with pacifism. That dissent was composed of liberals and conservatives with a vast array of moral philosophies and motives. Hunter is correct, however, in his brief description of the peace movement’s overall concern for the use of economic resources. Throughout the war, most protestors—pacifist or not—expressed regular concern about the effect of the war on Johnson’s “Great Society” program. The consistent theme resounded that billions of dollars spent annually in an unnecessary war effort could have been better used at home."

"From 1966 on, this kind of argument emphasizing the disjuncture between values and behavior became predominant in the journals opposing the war. In April 1966, the Century claimed that the use of idealistic arguments to support American involvement in Vietnam no longer worked. The “self-righteous argument” that Americans were in Vietnam “because a freedom-loving people summoned us to their aid” had “eroded and collapsed not because wise men exposed its error – . . . but because it can no longer stand against the relentless assaults of unfolding events.”"

"Borrowing a phrase of Senator William J. Fulbright from the title of his well-known series of talks at Johns Hopkins University during the spring of 1966, American dissenters to the war were not so much bothered by the use of power; they were instead bothered by the “arrogance” that accompanied America’s use of power, an arrogance that violated America’s expressed ideals. Fulbright compared the country’s arrogance to that of Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany. These comparisons, especially the one to Hitler, upset many Americans, but such comparisons became frequent in many peace circles after 1966."

"King’s speech linked the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam in a way that made many black leaders uncomfortable. Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, Jr. both criticized his speech. The board of the NAACP passed a resolution to keep the two movements separate. King’s speech recognized that the connections were not something one chose, but rather intrinsic to what both movements were about: In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” . . . Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.” . . . So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be saved are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land."

"He called for a “radical revolution of values.” Revolutions were taking place all over the globe, he told his audience. “It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.” King offered a five-step program “to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam.” He called for an end to all bombing; a unilateral cease fire with the goal of beginning negotiations; the curtailment of all military build-up elsewhere in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand and Laos; acceptance of the NLF as a player in any future Vietnamese government; and the establishment of a date for all foreign troops to leave Vietnam. He urged the church to seek out “every creative means of protest possible.” To all ministers who held ministerial exemptions, he recommended giving them up in order to seek conscientious objector status, a status that most likely would be denied. The injustice of the war needed to be exposed in whatever ways were possible. The next week, King’s name was listed as a national co-chair of CALCAV. On April 15, the Spring Mobilization gathered between 150,000 and 400,000 protesters (estimates vary) in New York City and another 50,000 in San Francisco. The antiwar movement had gained considerable strength. Meanwhile, some 438,000 troops were now in Vietnam"

"Evangelical supporters of the war never seemed to question their own support of the war, or to interpret it as an example of dabbling in political affairs or approving military strategy. They had no problem reporting that Billy Graham, after making a visit to Vietnam, "said that Americans should back their President in his decision to make a stand in Viet Nam.” In the words of the Century, “they have made their peace with this evil thing . . . Is it not ironic?”"

"In a letter to the editor, Graham chided the Century for attributing to him an opinion about the war. “I have been extremely careful,” he wrote, “not to be drawn into either the moral implications or the tactical military problems of the Vietnam war.” The Century responded by reminding Graham of the many ways he had passed judgment: his recent condemnation of King’s address, his protest against protesters, describing them as “giving comfort to the enemy,” and his many examples of vocal support of American policy in Vietnam. From “his position high above life’s sordid arena,” the editor wrote, “Graham plunged into the dangerous waters of opinion.” One wonders what the Century would have written if they had known that a few years later, Graham used his influence with Nixon to “gain draft exemptions for Campus Crusade staff members, contending that, though unordained, they were doing the work of ministers.”39 Events during the Vietnam and Nixon years did not do much to draw out Graham’s better qualities."

"Near the year’s end, Christian leaders were certain that the war was winding down. Little did they know that the number of Americans killed would nearly double before war’s end. Between March 1968 and March 1969, the total number of dead grew from 19,670 to 33,641, (more than the 33,629 that represented the total number of Americans killed in the Korean War). The total count of the dead would grow to nearly 58,000 within the next three years."

"Catholic opposition to the war began to grow considerably beginning in 1967. By July, a plurality of Catholics opposed further escalation (52% opposed; 36% in favor). Editors at America lagged considerably behind. By January 1971, 80% of Catholics favored the return of all military personnel by the end of the year. That same year, in November, Catholic Bishops issued a collective resolution declaring that the Vietnam War no longer met just war criteria. “It is our firm conviction,” their statement read, “that the speedy ending of this war is a moral imperative of the highest priority.”"

"The most radical dissent among evangelicals came from the Post-American (later Sojourners) community. Led by James Wallis and founded in 1971, this community of students at Trinity Evangelical Seminary in Deerfield, Illinois, came under the watchful eye of the FBI for their protests against Vietnam. They took the name “post-American” for their journal because they had given up on America’s values. They regarded American society as “oppressive” and beyond redemption. Christians needed to assume a post-American posture. Wallis viewed the Christian response to Vietnam as proof that the church in America was “captive and . . . morally impotent.” For the Post-American crowd, allegiance to America in the Vietnam era meant disobedience to God. Wallis and his community represented a new movement among young evangelicals, one far to the left of the Century in its view of social revolution and Vietnam. After the war, other evangelicals accused Wallis of being blind to the plight of the refugees because of his blind support for the unification of the country at all costs under the revolutionary principles of North Vietnam."

"In 1978, James Wall, the new editor of the Century, took a nostalgic look back at the 1960s, “when the civil rights movement and opposition to the war in Vietnam made the church’s liberal posture so right.” The church could be sure in those days, on those issues, that it was on the right side: “the cause was just and the issues clear-cut. Or so they appeared.” Living through that period caused some to believe that the church could always speak with clarity and authority in the public arena. There is a tendency when things seem so clear to assume that God’s blessing absolutely supports your position. The danger lurking in this assumption is illustrated by the Century’s endorsement of Johnson over Goldwater in 1964. They were sure Johnson was God’s man for the job, so sure that they were willing to lose their tax exempt status to say so. As Wall pointed out, it is dangerous to ignore the ambiguity that exists in every human situation. The Christian position has to be willing to embrace “ambiguity” and the willingness to recognize that God “sanctifies no single political solution.”"

"Johnson: What do you think about this Vietnam thing? I’d like to hear you talk a little bit."

"Johnson: Well, they’d impeach a president, though, that would run out, wouldn’t they?"

"The last public levy was 297 lbs. (of tobacco) per poll, and the great levy the year before has given occasion for malignant spirits to mutter, and may cause some to mutiny, "for the common people will never be brought to understand the just reason of a public charge, or will they ever believe that the expense is for their own preservation." Since General Davis and Pate were hanged the rabble have been much appalled. Now enjoy peace among themselves, though never body was more replete with malignancy and frenzy than our people were about August last, and they wanted but a monstrous head to their monstrous body. The greatest revolution has occurred in Virginia affairs, for as their rebellion was grounded upon madness and folly, so the wheel has turned again as wonderfully and swiftly in the submission of all the chief rebels…"

"The information of Timothy Biggs threw the Lords Proprietors into apprehensive confusion. These were dangerous times for everyone engaged in colonization. Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia had almost seemed to set a pattern for revolts. The Davyes-Pate Rebellion in Maryland, although little more than a Sunday afternoon affair, had been considered so serious that its leaders suffered death by hanging. And in London there were whispers that the King's Government were mentioning proprietary colonies in the same breath with Quo Warranto, the legal writ sometimes employed to revoke charters."

"As Bacon's Rebellion entered its radical phase, Bacon tried to spread the revolutionary movement to the neighboring colonies, each of which had severe and often similar grievances against its government and the Crown. At the height of Bacon's Rebellion, in September 1676, sixty persons, led by William Davyes and John Pate, assembled in Calvert County, Maryland, to declare their opposition to crushing taxation and to Lord Baltimore's disfranchisement of the freemen. They also declared their refusal to swear to a new loyalty oath proposed by the proprietor. They refused to obey the governor's order to disband on promise to consider their grievances in the next Assembly, pointing out that the manipulated Assembly no longer represented the people. But the death of Bacon caused the quick collapse of the embryo Davyes-Pate rebellion, and Davyes and Pate were hanged after being denounced as traitors. The governor observed with satisfaction that the people were now suitably "terrified." The threat was over, but the governor wrote in warning to Lord Baltimore that never had a people been "more replete with malignancy and frenzy." Apparently, the Maryland regime had had a close call. The result increased the bitterness in the colony against the proprietor."

"Every measure of prudence... ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States."

"Slavery in this country, I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century."

"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."

"Many in the south once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."

"This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."

"As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that, it is true, has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage, a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then-colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of liberty, with which Heaven, without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features, has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our constitution of government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal, and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property, and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract."

"During slavery, "Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon," writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, "Flush Times and Fever Dreams." That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the , the and the . It is the culture that has produced and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a capitalism of poverty wages, and ; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is."

"We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

"If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain, When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?"

"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three."

"Where slavery exists the republican Theory becomes still more fallacious."

"To Americans, that some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications."

"The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the general principles of Christianity, in which all those sects were united, and the general principles of English and American liberty, in which all those young men united, and which had united all parties in America, in majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her independence. Now I will avow, that I then believed and now believe that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God; and that those principles of liberty are as unalterable as human nature and our terrestrial, mundane system."

"What has suddenly happened is that the white race has lost its heroes. Worse, its heroes have been revealed as villains and its greatest heroes as the arch-villains. The new generations of whites, appalled by the sanguine and despicable record carved over the face of the globe by their race in the last five hundred years, are rejecting the panoply of white heroes, whose heroism consisted in erecting the inglorious edifice of colonialism and imperialism; heroes whose careers rested on a system of foreign and domestic exploitation, rooted in the myth of white supremacy and the manifest destiny of the white race."

"About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."

"I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men...I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise...In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was "settled" that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were "final;" not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times."

"[[Thomas Jefferson|[Thomas] Jefferson]] spoke for all the most prominent members of the revolutionary generation in urging posterity not to accept their political prescriptions as sacred script. It is richly ironic that one of the few original intentions they all shared was opposition to any judicial doctrine of " original intent." To be sure, they all wished to be remembered, but they did not want to be embalmed."

"For the founders, the laws of nature and of nature’s God — accessible to all rational humans — supply the sufficient ground for [the] republican morality necessary to make self-government work. Demanding, as [Douglas] Wilson seems to do, that public officials proclaim their personal faith in Christ is neither wise, nor moral, nor American, nor Christian."

"We can not overestimate the fervent love of liberty, the intelligent courage, and the sum of common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government. When they found, after a short trial, that the confederacy of states, was too weak to meet the necessities of a vigorous and expanding republic, they boldly set it aside, and in its stead established a National Union, founded directly upon the will of the people, endowed with full power of self-preservation and ample authority for the accomplishment of its great object."

"Our founders were insightful students of human nature. They feared the abuse of power because they understood that every human being has not only "better angels" in his nature, but also an innate vulnerability to temptation — especially the temptation to abuse power over others."

"Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state."

"There is something pathetic in seeing Americans almost daily besmirching unconsciously their ideals and their traditions — all thanks to a faulty education. The Founding Fathers would turn in their graves if they could hear themselves called "Democrats"; America indeed was never a democracy, and never will be . . . unless we make "democracy work," and replace, within the framework of a "pure democracy," our legislation by the Gallup Poll. Those who have been taught the wrong interpretation may ask their money back from the schools where they have wasted their adolescence. And the textbooks which preach a spurious democracy may still provide us with fuel in cold days to come."

"The achievements of women's rights movements, for instance, were real and important, but you cannot understand them if you do not first understand the founding fathers’ achievement in establishing a system of government based on the guarantee of rights."

"They were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us."

"Communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished."

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

"Autocracy declares the divine right of kings; its authority cannot be questioned; its powers are arbitrarily or unjustly administered."

"Being good gentlemen of the Enlightenment, the Founders thought that the demise of slavery would come about naturally. Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, all believed that somehow slavery would disappear."

"The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight. Its discovery was the great triumph of our Founding Fathers, voiced by William Penn when he said: “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” Explaining the inalienable rights of men, Jefferson said, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” And it was George Washington who said that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” And finally, that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America’s greatness and genius—and he said: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America. America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Well, I’m pleased to be here today with you who are keeping America great by keeping her good. Only through your work and prayers and those of millions of others can we hope to survive this perilous century and keep alive this experiment in liberty, this last, best hope of man."

"The patriots who built our country were not villains, they were heroes whose courageous deeds improved the Earth beyond measure. The beauty and the glory of our constitutional system is that it gives us the tools to fight injustice, to heal division, and to continue the work of our Founding Fathers by expanding and growing the blessings of America. If you believe in justice, if you believe in freedom, if you believe in peace, then you must cherish the principles of our founding and the text of our Constitution. It is our founding and our Constitution. It is a firm foundation upon which all progress is achieved. That’s why our country is so strong, even despite terrible things that happen over the generations."

"All the leading Founders affirmed on many occasions that blacks are created equal to whites and that slavery is wrong."

"In many ways, pseudo-science merely provided sophisticated rationales for such measures. Ideas like 'Social Darwinism', which erroneously inferred from Darwin's theories a struggle for survival between the races, or 'racial hygiene', which argued that physical and mental degeneration would result from miscegenation, came some time after prohibitions had been enacted. This was especially obvious in Britain's North American colonies and the United States. From the earliest phase of British settlement in North America there had been laws designed to discourage miscegenation and to circumscribe the rights of mulattos. Interracial marriage may have been a punishable offence in Virginia from as early as 1630 and was formally prohibited by legislation in 1662; the colony of Maryland had passed similar legislation a year earlier. Such laws were passed by five other North American colonies."

"In the century after the foundation of the United States, no fewer than thirty-eight states banned interracial marriages. In 1915, twenty-eight states retained such statutes; ten of them had gone so far as to make the prohibition on miscegenation constitutional. There was even an attempt, in December 1912, to amend the federal constitution so as to prohibit 'forever . . . intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians . . . within the United States'. The language of the various statutes and constitutional articles certainly changed over time, as rationalizations for the ban on interracial sex evolved, and as new threats to racial purity emerged. Definitions of whiteness and blackness became more precise: in Virginia, for example, anyone with one or more 'Negro' grandparents was defined as a 'Negro', but it was possible to have one 'Indian' great-grandparent and still be white in the eyes of the law. Depending on patterns of immigration, a number of states extended their prohibitions to include 'Mongolians', 'Asiatic Indians', Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Malays. Penalties also varied widely. Some laws simply declared interracial unions null and void, depriving couples of the legal privileges of marriage; others specified penalties of up to ten years in prison. Nevertheless, the underlying motivation seems remarkably consistent and enduring."

"The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow."

"And what was the cost of this Jim Crow? Not merely that the precious words "America" and "freedom" became suspect in the eyes of the world, but more than that. It cost us lives. Lives of white men, of Frenchmen, Russians and Chinese-because there were many battles in this war when replacements were needed. But the American rule of war was "No Negroes allowed on the front lines" until the 92d finally got there. I listened to the Axis radio. Tokyo Rose said, and she quoted American sources, that Negroes were good enough to serve in the American Army, but they weren't good enough to pitch in the American Big League baseball. And they broadcast this not only to our own troops but also to the billion and a half colored peoples of the earth."

"To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. ... We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished."

"I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the forty acres and a mule that the United States initially promised freed slaves. This unfulfilled promise and the serious devastation that slavery had on African-American lives has never been officially recognized by the United States Government."

"So far as the Negroes were concerned, their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified, and to give them anything less than this was an economic farce."

"To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world."

"The Sherman order gave rise to all sorts of difficulties. The Negroes were given only possessory titles. Then the owners came back and immediately there was trouble. The Negroes protested, “What is the use of giving us freedom if we can’t stay where we were raised and own our own house where we were born and our own piece of ground?” It was on May 25, 1865, that Johnson in his Proclamation of Pardon had provided easy means whereby all property could be restored, except the land at Port Royal, which had been sold for taxes. General Howard came to Charleston to make arrangements, and the story is characteristic—“At first,” said a witness, “the people hesitated, but soon as the meaning struck them that they must give up their little homes and gardens and work for others, there was a general murmuring of dissatisfaction.”"

"President Johnson, forgetting his own pre-war declaration that the “great plantations must be seized, and divided into small farms,” declared that this land must be restored to its original owners and this would be done if owners received a presidential pardon. The pardoning power was pushed and the land all over the South rapidly restored. Negroes were dispossessed."

"The Negro voter ... had, then, but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right. This was a perfectly fair and natural demand and ought to have been an integral part of Emancipation. To emancipate four million laborers whose labor had been owned, and separate them from the land upon which they had worked for nearly two and a half centuries, was an operation such as no modern country had for a moment attempted or contemplated. The German and English and French serf, the Italian and Russian serf, were, on emancipation, given definite rights in the land. Only the American Negro slave was emancipated without such rights and in the end this spelled for him the continuation of slavery."

"Treason must be made odious, and the traitors must be punished and impoverished, their great plantations must be seized, and divided into small farms, and sold to honest, industrious men. The day for protecting the lands and negroes of these authors of rebellion is past."

"In October of 1865, the freedpeople of Edisto Island, South Carolina, learned that the land they had farmed during the war and now regarded as their own was about to be restored to its rebel owners. They sent a letter of protest to General O. O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. “Land monopoly is injurious to the advancement of the course of freedom,” wrote a committee of three, “and if Government Does not make some provision by which we as Freedmen can obtain A Homestead, we have Not bettered our condition.” This judgment reflected the sentiment of former slaves..."

"To the extent that 1776 led to the resultant U.S., which came to captain the African Slave Trade—as London moved in an opposing direction toward a revolutionary abolition of this form of property—the much-celebrated revolt of the North American settlers can fairly be said to have eventuated as a counter-revolution of slavery."

"On 22 June 1772 in a London courtroom ... the presiding magistrate, Lord Mansfield, had just made a ruling that suggested that slavery, the blight that had ensnared so many, would no longer obtain, at least not in England. A few nights later, a boisterous group of Africans, numbering in the hundreds, gathered for a festive celebration. ... Others were not so elated, particularly in Virginia, where the former “property” in question in this case had been residing. “Is it in the Power of Parliament to make such a Law? Can any human law abrogate the divine? The Law[s] of Nature are the Laws of God,” wrote one querulously questioning writer. Indicating that this was not a sectional response, a correspondent in Manhattan near the same time assured that this ostensibly anti-slavery ruling “will occasion a greater ferment in America (particularly in the islands) than the Stamp Act itself,” a reference to another London edict that was then stirring controversy in the colonies. The radical South Carolinian William Drayton—whose colony barely contained an unruly African majority—was apoplectic about this London decision, asserting that it would “complete the ruin of many American provinces.”"

"Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right, and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state."

"The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."

"I do in Virtue of the Power and Authority to ME given, by His MAJESTY, determine to execute Martial Law, and cause the same to be executed throughout this Colony: and to the end that Peace and good Order may the sooner be [effected], I do require every Person capable of bearing Arms, to [resort] to His MAJESTY'S STANDARD, or be looked upon as Traitors to His MAJESTY'S Crown and Government, and thereby become liable to the Penalty the Law inflicts upon such Offences; such as forfeiture of Life, confiscation of Lands, &c. &c. And I do hereby further declare all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms, they joining His MAJESTY'S Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper Sense of their Duty, to His MAJESTY'S Leige Subjects.."

"What happened to the Negro in this country is not simply a matter of my memory or my history; it's a matter of American history and American memory. As a Negro, I cannot afford to deny or overlook it, but the white American necessity is precisely to deny, ignore and overlook it."

"Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today’s important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored."

"The object of this new American industrial empire, so far as that object was conscious and normative, was not national well-being, but the individual gain of the associated and corporate monarchs through the power of vast profit on enormous capital investment; through the efficiency of an industrial machine that bought the highest managerial and engineering talent and used the latest and most effective methods and machines in a field of unequaled raw material and endless market demand. That this machine might use the profit for the general weal was possible and in cases true. But the uplift and well-being of the mass of men, of the cohorts of common labor, was not its ideal or excuse. Profit, income, uncontrolled power in My Business for My Property and for Me—this was the aim and method of the new monarchial dictatorship that displaced democracy in the United States in 1876."

"The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans."

"The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law. ... In this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy."

"The history of the United States is that of a struggle for the right of self-determination and human dignity. Our story begins with a ringing declaration which has inspired millions of free people everywhere, that "all men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." But this same declaration also states that, along with this self-determination, we must show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." In world affairs this nation has striven to confirm and give meaning to these noble words. Through the years we have helped new countries achieve political and economic strength. And the way we dealt with the Suez crisis and its after-effects in the UN was also an action demonstrating our conviction that international harmony begins with "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.""

"The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind. It now spans four centuries and, as we enter the new millennium, we need to retell it, for if we can learn those lessons and build upon them, the whole of humanity will benefit in the new age which is now opening. American history raises three fundamental questions. First, can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of an indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness. Has the United States done this? Has it expiated its original sins? The second question provides the key to the first. In the process of nation-building, can ideals and altruism—the desire to build the perfect community—be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all? Have the Americans got the mixture right? Have they forged a nation where righteousness has the edge over the needful self-interest? Thirdly, the Americans originally aimed to build an other-worldly ‘City on a Hill,’ but found themselves designing a republic of the people, to be a model for the entire planet. Have they made good their audacious claims? Have they indeed proved exemplars for humanity? And will they continue to be so in the new millennium?"

"These early diaries and letters, which are plentiful, and the fact that most important documents about the early American colonies have been preserved, mean that the United States is the first nation in human history whose most distant origins are fully recorded."

"In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth."

"Republicans, for the past few decades, have depended on Americans’ inability to make sense of history in judging their policies. How else to explain the fact that, under Trump, they have succeeded in turning illegal immigration into the excuse for all the country’s ills, when any clear historical analysis would demonstrate that it has been the fount of the lion’s share of America’s innovation, creativity, and economic production?"

"Barred from Twitter, Trump issued a proclamation on the federal holiday earlier Monday encouraging "all Americans to recommit themselves to Dr. King’s dream by engaging in acts of service to others, to their community, and to our Nation." Later, his White House issued a a 45-page document dubbed the “The 1776 Report", which claimed that “identity politics makes it less likely that racial reconciliation and healing can be attained by pursuing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream.” The report seems to be a response to The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which traced the story of slavery through American history and became a lightning rod for Trump and conservatives, who saw it as an attack on their view of American history."

"When history does appear in the news, it’s often been politicized. The 1776 Commission was one example, with its anachronistic references to the “Pro-Life Movement” and comparisons of American progressives to Mussolini. But the New York Times’ 1619 Project was also problematic—though it was journalism, not a government report. The project claims that “our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” based on the questionably supported and readily disputable initial claim “that the colonists declared their independence from Britain … to protect the institution of slavery in the colonies” (although the Times’ later made a “clarification” and other alterations). Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, a critic of both projects, recently noted this connection: “[The 1776 Commission report is] the flip side of those polemics, presented as history, that charge the nation was founded as a slavocracy. … It’s basically a political document, not history.”"

"For the first time in our history, a President had not just lost an election. He tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob reached the Capitol. But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such an attack never, never happens again."

"Now let's step up, write the next chapter in American history, for January 6 marks not the end of democracy, but the beginning of a renaissance of liberty and fair play."

"All the folks that we would go out and send our children to go and meet around the world are clear about our history, and we’re going to send our own children out to not know what it is? Building in a handicap for our children, that they are going to be the ones in the room who don’t know their own history when the rest of the world does?"

"The changes to the state curriculum came a year after the Republican Florida governor, the presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis, enacted the Stop Woke Act, Time reported. The law prohibits teaching students or employees about anything that could cause them to “feel guilt, anguish or any form of psychological distress” because of their race, color, national origin or sex. LaGarrett J King, director of the Center for K-12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University at Buffalo, said the updates to the Florida curriculum were “anti-Black”. Students of Florida, King said, will be “extremely ignorant about the history of this country. “For those who are going to college, there’s going to be a lot of correction. Especially if they go outside of the state. For those who don’t go to college, they’re going to hold these inaccurate perceptions about Black people throughout their years, if they don’t get any correction.” King added: “I’m fearful because history is about identity and history helps us understand other folk. If we do not understand the complexities of those histories, that can have some damaging consequences to how we treat people in the present.”"

"For people who want to question whether America has a racist history, just go back and look at the political cartoons. The history is horrible."

"The American Negro Academy believes that upon those of the race who have had the advantage of higher education and culture, rests the responsibility of taking concerted steps for the employment of these agencies to uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action"

"During the last two decades of the nineteenth century black Americans experienced a relentless attack on their social, political, and economic rights. This resulted in a decline the their status throughout the United States and especially in the South, where slightly less than 90 percent of them lived. Beginning in 1890, measures designed to disfranchise blacks began to be written into the constitutions of southern states; and, by 1910, most blacks had been eliminated as voters. It was in this same period that racial segregation, or Jim Crow ideas, began to be translated into law and steadily extended to all areas of life in the South."

"By the mid-1880s blacks of all classes, in the North as well as the South, were coming to feel that the intense and implacable hostility of whites left them no alternative but to accept a separate existence apart from the larger American community. Many continued to protest and agitate for all their rights as citizens, but the impossibility of halting their exclusion had to be acknowledged. Confronted with this situation black Americans began to pour their energies into the creation of cultural, welfare, religious, educational, economic, and social institutions that would be counterparts to the ones from which whites barred them."

"May 23rd: Today we had our first death, that of a small child from whooping cough. Bad Camp. Poor grass and no wood."

"During all this time, farther to the north, another territory had been coming into being. The “Oregon Trail” had brought many men from the more crowded states of the North-East to find their homes and establish their farms along the undefined Canadian frontier to the Pacific. With the prospect of war in the South for the acquisition of Texas and California, the American Government was not anxious to embark upon a quarrel with Great Britain upon its Northern frontier. There was strong opposition by the Southerners to the acquisition of Oregon, where the Northern pioneers were opposed to slavery. Oregon would be another “free soil state.” Negotiations were opened with Britain, and in spite of electioneering slogans of “Fifty-four-forty or fight” the boundary was settled in June 1846 by peaceful diplomacy along the forty-ninth parallel. This solution owed much to the accommodating nature of the Foreign Secretary in Peel’s Government, Lord Aberdeen. The controversy now died down, and in 1859 the territory of Oregon reached statehood."

""The most significant thing that I did in terms of research was to find published accounts of the actual diaries of people who travelled the trail,” he explains. “I took several of those diaries and read them all the way through and kept track of the things that really did happen. I also kept score so I could get a sense of the frequency with which certain things happened: what percentage of the days were bad weather, what percentage of the days were they low on food and things like that.” Another consequence of the research was the sensitive portrayal of Native Americans. When reading old accounts Rawitsch was surprised by just how often Native tribes intervened to offer assistance to travelers that were struggling along the trail. This was something he hoped he could insert into the game to combat the negative stereotypes that were prevalent at the time in other media. “We were very concerned about the way Native Americans were portrayed, because the schools that we taught in had significant populations of Native American students. In the diaries I read I probably should admit to being surprised by how often people wrote about the help they received from Native Americans who helped them understand where the trail was, where it went, what kind of food along the way was edible and which would make you ill.” This manifested itself in the game as a new event that could occur when players were struggling. Native Americans would approach the party and offer help by sharing food or supplies with the settlers."

"The US has an unusually violent labor history, well into the twentieth century."

"American labor was strongest when the threat of communism was greatest. The apogee of America's welfare state, with all its limitations, was coterminous with the height of the Cold War. The dismantling of the welfare state and the labor movement, meanwhile, marched in tandem with communism's collapse."

"The United States had the bloodiest labor wars of any industrialized nation. Hundreds of workers were killed. Thousands were wounded. Tens of thousands were blacklisted. Radical union organizers such as Joe Hill were executed on trumped up murder charges, imprisoned like Eugene V. Debs, or driven, like Haywood, into exile. Militant unions were outlawed. During the on November 17, 1919, carried out on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, more than ten thousand alleged Communists, Socialists and anarchists were arrested. Many were held for long periods without trial. Thousands of foreign-born emigrés, such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and , were arrested, imprisoned and ultimately deported. Socialist publications, such as and , were shut down."

"The holds a particular place in the history and theory of the labour movement, as well as today reaction to the bosses and the government during the coronavirus pandemic. [...] The great advance of American workers in the 1930s that led to the founding of the and a vast expansion of the derived from just such wildcat strikes in the rubber plants, the auto industry, among electrical workers and many others. Workers walked out by the thousands, some occupied their plants, while others created mass picket lines, fought scabs and police. Wildcat strikes spread during the Depression decade like a virus through the United States, drawing in small industrial shops and retail workers. A similar thing happened in the 1960s and 1970s with teachers and public employees who walked out in illegal strikes to found their unions. Rank-and-file upheavals also transformed the in the 1970s and shook up other unions as well."

"The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the bordertowns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in our heads."

"Even as American colonizers tapped a native elite to govern in a region with far more Euro-American soldiers than civilians, they also needed to keep Mexican Americans and Indians in their racial place. For Mexican Americans, as the native elite in [New Mexico], the distinction between political and social equality became paramount, if not always openly discussed. Though Euro-American men ceded formal political equality to Mexican American men, this did not translate into social equality between Euro-Americans and Mexican Americans."

"The success of Mexican Americans in maintaining a distinctive culture in the Southwest did not lie in the fact that they violently or even overtly resisted Anglo Americans’ steady encroachments on their way of life. Rather, the ultimately political and social significant of the perpetuation of distinct Mexican American communities throughout the Southwest lay in the fact that Mexican Americans were able to survive and persist as an ethnically distinct people despite the change in political sovereignty over their homeland. In technical, political terms, although Mexican Americans, by virtue of their new status as American citizens, were no longer Mexicans, American racism and Mexican Americans’ de facto subordinate status in the new social order encouraged them to consider themselves Mexicans in a way they never had before."

"Research on the Mexican Americans’ prehistory needs to consider their ancient past in Europe and Africa, because Mexican Americans are a racially mixed people with a complex history of conquest."

"World War II, then, imbued the ongoing Mexican American civil rights movement with new leadership and a new attitude of entitlement - Mexican American men had, in large numbers, served their country as Americans; now it was time to reap the benefits of full citizenship rights."

"The Texas Rangers brutalized Mexican American communities in Texas. The rinches, as many Mexican Americans called them, were originally a group of deputized gunmen hired to protect the land of Anglo ranchers and farmers from perceived predators. The reality was that in most instances, Mexican Americans were trying to retrieve land stolen from them by Anglos."

"Burned and scratched, some of the more fortunate survivors told of being hurled from the plane still attached to their seats, and of turning back in their escape from the burning jet to pull fellow passengers to safety."

"After the accident, Korean Air announced that it planned to spend more than $100 million over the next two years on safety initiatives, including changes in pilot training and maintenance operations."

"The wait for remains has been excruciating for the families of the victims, most of them South Korean. A scuffle broke out Thursday at a hotel used as a center for the families when mourners hungry for information saw a Korean Air representative hold a news conference for reporters instead of briefing the families."

"Witnesses said the plane plowed through the jungle trailing smoke and flames, before it came to rest. The first rescuers had to make a maddeningly slow journey to the wreckage, trudging in with flashlights after hacking their way through razor-sharp grass that came up to their shoulders. They were followed by a bulldozer that slowly leveled a path over the rocky ground, the witnesses said."

"Transcripts of cockpit voice recordings recovered from the wreckage show confusion in the cockpit, with crew members questioning one another repeatedly about the state of the instrument landing system and failing to follow procedures that would have kept them all aware of how close they were getting to the ground."

"The cause of the crash was attributed to failure to adequately brief and execute a non-precision approach, and the Federal Aviation Administration's intentional inhibition of the minimum safe altitude warning system at Guam, the report showed."

"The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this mythic-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization.1"

"Although the white Americans . . . wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. White Americans could rest easier and the sufferings of other races could be blamed on the racial weakness rather than on whites’ relentless search for wealth and power."

"Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become."

"Another Belzoni activist would be attacked by White supremacists months later. Belzoni leader, entrepreneur, and grocer Gus Courts was warned after the murder of Lee that he would be "next on the list to go." Courts was distinguished from his peers by organizing a contingent. of Humphreys County Blacks to pay their poll taxes and register to vote in 1953. After being harassed by the Humphreys County Citizens' Council, Courts appealed to the state government for protection. Instead of receiving protection, Courts was confronted in his store by a local Citizens' Council member who possessed a copy of his letter appealing for protection. After the November 1955 elections, Courts was shot in his store. Friends took the wounded Courts two counties away to the hospital in Mound Bayou, due to concerns about the care Lee received in the Belzoni hospital after his assault. Courts recovered from the attack in Mound Bayou. Following advice from Medgar Evers, Courts decided to leave the state. Escorted by an armed Evers, Courts fled the Delta to Jackson. After stints in Texas and California, Courts and his family would eventually move to Chicago. An FBI investigation of the Courts shooting ended with no arrests. In Chicago, Courts was clearly a political exile of Mississippi apartheid. During a 1968 interview, Courts reflected, I had to leave my $15,000 a year grocery business, my trucking business and my home and everything—my wife and I—thousands of us Mississippians had to run away. We had to flee in the night. We are American refugees from the terror in the South all because we wanted to vote."

"Herkens, god yemen, Comley, corteys, and god, On of the best that yever bare bowe, Hes name was Roben Hode.Roben Hood was the yemans name, That was boyt corteys and fre; For the loffe of owre ladey, All wemen werschepyd he."

"Lythe and listin, gentilmen, That be of frebore blode; I shall you tel of a gode yeman, His name was Robyn Hode."

"A Yeman hadde he, and servaunts namo At that tyme, for him liste ryde so; And he was clad in cote and hood of grene; A sheef of pecok-arwes brighte and kene Under his belt he bar ful thriftily; (Wel coude he dresse his takel yemanly: His arwes drouped noght with fetheres lowe), And in his hand he bar a mighty bowe. A not-heed hadde he, with a broun visage. Of wode-craft wel coude he al the usage. Upon his arm he bar a gay bracer, And by his syde a swerd and a bokeler, And on that other syde a gay daggere, Harneised wel, and sharp as point of spere; A Cristofre on his brest of silver shene. An horn he bar, the bawdrik was of grene; A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse."

"My father was a Yoman, and had no landes of hys own, only he had a farme of iii. or iiii. pound by yere at the uttermooste, and here upon he tilled so much as kept halfe a dosen men. He had walke for a hundred shepe, and my mother milked xxx. kyne. He was able and did finde the kyng a harnesse, with himselfe, and his horse, whyle he came to the place that he shoulde receive the kynges wages. I can remembre, that I buckled hys harnesse, when he wente unto Blacke heathe felde. He kept me to schole, or els I hadde not bene able to have preached before the kinges majesty now. He maryed my systers wyth v. pounde, or xx. nobles a piece, so that he brought them up in godlinesse, and fear of God. He kepte hospitality for his pore neighboures. And some almesse he gave to the pore, and al thys dyd he of the said farm. Where he that now hath it, payeth xvi. pound by yere or more, and is not able to do any thing for his prince, for him selfe, nor for his children, or geve a cup of drink to the pore. Thus al the enhansyng and rearing goth to your private commodity and welth. So that where ye had a single to much, you have that : and sins the same, ye have enhansed the rent, and so have encresed another to muche. So nowe ye have double to muche, which is to to muche. But let the precher preach til his tong be worn to the stomps, nothing is amended. We have good statutes made for the common wealth as touching commeners, enclosers, many metings and sessions, but in the end of the matter, there commeth nothing forthe. Well, well, thys is one thing I wil say unto you, from whence it commeth I know, even from the devd. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to passe, that the yomanry be not able to put their sonnes to schole (as in dede universities do wondrously decay al redy) and that they be not able to marrye theyr daughters to the avoidynge of whoredome I say ye plucke salvation from the people, and utterly destroye the realme. For by yomans sonnes, the faith of Christe is, and hath bene maintayned chieflye. Is this realme taughte by rich mens sonnes? No, no, read the chronicles, ye shall finde somtime noble mennes sonnes, whych have bene unpreaching bishops and prelates, but ye shal fynde none of them learned men. But verily, they that shoulde looke to the redresse of these thinges, be the greatest againste them. In thys realme are a great many of folkes, and amongest many, I knowe but one of tender zeale, at the mocyon of his pore tenauntes, hath let down his landes to the old rentes for their relief. For Gods love, let not him be a Phenix, let him not be alone, let him not be an Hermite closed in a wal, some good man folow him, and do as he geveth example."

"... And you, good yeomen, Whose limbs were made in England, show us here The mettle of your pasture. Let us swear That you are worth your breeding, which I doubt not, For there is none of you so mean and base That hath not noble luster in your eyes."

"What of the men? The men were bred in England: The bowmen—the yeomen, The lads of dale and fell. Here’s to you—and to you! To the hearts that are true And the land where the true hearts dwell."

"A new Gallup poll showed that just 33 percent of Americans are satisfied with the nation's position in the world today. This is down from 65 percent in 2000. As Donald Trump and Joe Biden—two historically old and deeply unpopular presidential candidates—square off yet again for America's top job, it's not hard to understand these sentiments. America is in decline in the 21st century in measure after measure, from numerous public-policy failures, to increasingly dysfunctional politics, to an epidemic of mental health issues among young people. This predicament raises two essential questions: Is America's downturn merely another dip in a long arc of non-linear, yet essentially upward, progress? Or is it, rather, the first phase of steep and irreversible national decline? The answer lies with the American people. Like all nations, America is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And the trend line is moving hard in the wrong direction: Things are getting worse, not better. Tribalism is intensifying. Social-media platforms are getting smarter at manipulating human cognition. The political system's defects are worsening. And America's public-policy failures are deepening."

"The remedies are easy to prescribe. We must improve civic education in schools, raise awareness about cognitive biases throughout society, spend more time with people from other political tribes, reduce and regulate the use of social media, rework the political structure to foster more political parties and equal representation, double down on free speech, feverishly guard election integrity, and support a new Republican champion other than Donald Trump. Yet in practice these goals have been impossible to achieve. Two broad and overlapping global trends will only make reversing the free-fall harder as the 21st century marches on. First, technology is getting more sophisticated—at a dizzying pace. The positives are huge. The internet democratizes education. Streaming innovations like Netflix enrich entertainment. New products like self-driving cars revolutionize transportation. Highly sophisticated research dramatically improves medicine. Pioneering technologies substantially broaden the distribution of necessities like food and clothing."

"As former United States CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a September 2023 Foreign Affairs essay, The Dysfunctional Superpower, geopolitical threats to America are multiplying: "The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them." According to Gates, "The United States now confronts graver threats to its security than it has in decades, perhaps ever. Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own. Not since the Korean War has the United States had to contend with powerful military rivals in both Europe and Asia." But it's not just America's biggest rivals that matter. Within a few decades it's likely that even small countries will have military capacities that in key respects exceed those of the superpowers today. Given the dominance and cohesion of America's military, another civil war is highly unlikely. The worst-case scenario arising from America's dysfunction isn't domestic mismanagement; it's foreign policy miscalculation."

"These dynamics establish a striking truism that looms over humanity: The world's pre-eminent democracy and most powerful nation is in decline precisely when the challenges faced by the world are mounting and its need for rational leadership has never been more urgent. Somewhere beneath the thickening surface of tribal bedlam and political fervor, however, is still a core national impulse to confront and overcome big challenges. The question is how strong that impulse remains. The French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832. A close observer of human behavior, de Tocqueville traveled across the country taking copious notes on what he saw. His book, Democracy in America, is a classic text in political science. And he's been revered for capturing the true essence of America like few others have, either before or since. Perhaps de Tocqueville's most profound insight was that the "greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults." Twenty-first century America is putting this thesis through a searing test. Our nation is in decline—and the world will find out, soon enough, whether or not de Tocqueville's insight is still true."

"Experts sounded a dire alarm after the Trump administration pulled the plug on nearly $2 billion in substance abuse and mental health funding, leaving thousands of providers scrambling and patients in a lurch. Up to 2,800 grantees through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration received termination letters immediately — wiping out about 26% of the agency's entire budget with zero warning, The Guardian reported Wednesday. “It feels like Armageddon for everyone who’s on the frontlines of the addiction and mental health space,” Ryan Hampton, founder of Mobilize Recovery, a national advocacy organization for people in and seeking recovery, told the outlet. “The scope of care that’s disrupted by these grants is catastrophic. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people will die.”"

"Providers awoke to devastation that they'd be forced to conduct staff layoffs, program shutdowns, and that services would be halted immediately. The cuts axe overdose prevention, naloxone distribution, school mental health support, and help for pregnant women struggling with substance abuse. “Overnight, our entire backbone and infrastructure of addiction and mental health in this country flipped up on its head,” Hampton said. “These grants are lifesaving tools that honestly are a good reason why we have started to see a reversal in trends of drug overdoses in this country.” The move comes as overdose deaths finally dropped 27% in 2024 after two decades of climbing rates. "All of us are in a state of complete and utter shock that the administration would take such a reckless action," Hampton said. Legal challenges loom, but Hampton warned the damage is happening now. "People will die. People will die.""

"The Environmental Protection Agency is taking a major step toward changing its math to favor polluters over people: It’s going to stop tallying up the dollar value of lives saved and hospital visits avoided by air pollution regulations. Instead, the agency will consider the effects of regulations without attaching a price tag to human life. In particular, the EPA is changing how it conducts the cost-benefit analysis of regulations for two major pollutants, fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns — usually referred to as PM2.5 — and ozone. The change was buried in a document published this month analyzing the economic impacts of final pollution regulations for power plants, arguing that the way the EPA historically calculated the economic benefits of regulations had too much uncertainty and gave people “a false sense of precision.” So to fix this, the EPA will stop tabulating the benefits altogether “until the Agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts.” The news was first reported by the New York Times. On X, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin pushed back on the reporting, calling it “another dishonest, fake news claim” and that the agency is still considering lives saved when setting pollution limits."

"I spoke with several experts, including former EPA officials, and in fact, the change could lead to worsening air quality and harm public health. The EPA exists to regulate pollution that harms people, and when it comes to things like ozone and tiny particles, there is robust evidence of the damage they can do, contributing to heart attacks and asthma attacks. Measured over populations, air pollution takes years off of people’s lives. Every year in the United States alone, air pollution pushes 135,000 people into early graves. “There is a lot of science that shows very clearly that being exposed to increasing levels of PM2.5 has significant health impacts,” said Janet McCabe, who served as the EPA’s deputy administrator under President Joe Biden."

"Anytime the EPA wants to issue a new regulation — say, revising how much mercury a power plant is allowed to emit — it looks at both the costs and the benefits before finalizing the rule. The EPA adds up how much companies would likely have to spend on things like installing upgraded scrubbers in smokestacks. Then the agency estimates the economic benefit of imposing the regulation, such as more days with cleaner air or fewer workers calling out sick. The biggest benefits usually come from improving health through things like avoiding hospital visits and reducing early deaths. There is some fuzziness in the numbers on both sides of the ledger though. If a bunch of companies turn to a handful of suppliers for pollution control equipment, that could drive up compliance costs. And how exactly do you price a hypothetical emergency room trip that didn’t happen? “In my experience at EPA, there’s never a perfect estimate of costs or benefits,” McCabe said. Yet even with imperfect calculations, regulators could get a decent sense of whether the juice was worth the squeeze when it comes to a new pollution standard, and the public would get a window into how the decision was made. Under the Biden administration, the EPA found that enforcing the more stringent PM2.5 regulations it issued in 2024 would add up to $46 billion in health benefits by 2032, vastly more than the cost of complying with the rule. The EPA now effectively wants to put receipts from the benefits side of the ledger through the shredder."

"This change in math is part of a broader pattern at the EPA — and across the federal government — of just measuring and counting fewer things under the second Trump Administration. The EPA has already closed its Office of Research and Development, which was meant to provide the scientific basis for environmental regulations, like tracking the effects of toxic chemicals on the human body. With less data on science and economics, agencies like the EPA have less accountability for their actions as they face more pressure from the White House to cut regulations and craft policies benefiting politically favored industries. It also sets the stage for taking the teeth out of other regulations, like the Clean Air Act. The EPA has already dismantled its legal foundation for addressing climate change. Joseph Goffman, who served as assistant administrator of the EPA’s air and radiation office under Biden, said this change in how the EPA calculates health benefits is part of a broader campaign against air pollution regulations. “It really illustrates what the ulterior motive is and that is to mute or mask the true impact of [particulate matter] exposure and the huge benefits that flow from reducing it,” Goffman said. “Suddenly deciding that you can’t ascribe a dollar value to reducing PM really is convenient to the point of being instrumental to Zeldin’s efforts to weaken PM standards.” If the EPA never comes up with a new way to monetize the health benefits of regulations, it’s likely that improvements in air quality will stall, and air pollution could get worse. “One would anticipate that we could see PM 2.5 levels rising across the country,” Hasenkopf said."

"Lawmakers from both parties and houses of Congress have agreed to provide about $653 million to fund Voice of America’s parent agency, rejecting President Donald Trump’s demand to defund the international broadcaster and shut it down. A bipartisan spending bill released Sunday would allocate $643 million for broadcasting from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, plus nearly $10 million for capital improvements. That figure is down from the $867 million appropriated for the agency each of the past two years, but it’s more than four times the $153 million Trump requested that Congress provide to “support the orderly shutdown of USAGM operations.” The outlay is included in a broader bipartisan spending deal negotiated by House and Senate appropriators. The package still requires House and Senate approval before heading to Trump’s desk. “We understand the realities of the appropriations process, but I am disappointed that Congress is proposing half a billion dollars more in funding than we requested,” Kari Lake, the deputy CEO installed by Trump to shut down the agency, wrote in a statement Monday. “While reductions from prior years are a step in the right direction, USAGM can still advance President Trump’s message and share America’s story globally without wasting so much taxpayer money.”"

"The bipartisan commitment to funding USAGM reflects continued congressional support for America’s role in promoting the free flow of news and information abroad, a long-standing foundation of its soft power around the world. Congress’s funding proposal comes after a dire year for USAGM. Trump signed an executive order in March calling for the dismantlement of the government agency, which oversees Voice of America and funds nonprofit groups including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. To carry out the order, Lake placed more than 1,300 Voice of America staffers on paid administrative leave — many of whom are still not working — and halted broadcasting operations the same month. It was the first time VOA went dark since it was first set up in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda. In response, VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, and a separate group of USAGM staffers sued the Trump administration, arguing that its actions were illegal. Lake, a former Arizona television anchor who lost high-profile races for governor and U.S. Senate in recent years, has defended the cuts and called for the agency’s eventual elimination. She told Congress in a June hearing that USAGM was “incompetent, corrupt, biased, and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world.” She has also said USAGM is “not salvageable.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment."

"The U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025 for the first time in at least half a century as a result of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, according to a report released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution. Although the administration has undertaken aggressive removal efforts, the negative number is mostly due to a significant drop in entries into the U.S., the report said. "We estimate net flows of -295,000 to -10,000 for the year," the Brookings study stated. "Though a high degree of policy uncertainty remains, continued negative net migration for 2026 is also likely." The report attributed the shift to combination of the large drop in entries and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures. The Trump administration's suspension of many humanitarian programs -- including most refugee programs with the exception of those involving white South Africans -- and a decline in temporary visas also contributed to the negative net migration, the report said. The report's authors estimate there were between 310,000 and 315,000 removals in 2025, a figure lower than what the administration has claimed. Department of Homeland Security officials claim that, so far, more than 600,000 people have been removed during the crackdown. "At 310,000 to 315,000, the 2025 removals are not much higher than the 2024 removals of around 285,000," the report states."

"Unlike in 2024, most removals in 2025 were initiated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection from the country's interior, the report said, as opposed to being initiated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- despite the actions of some ICE officers dominating many news headlines. A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CPB and ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News. The report's authors also predicted removals will increase in 2026 with funding from President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the report said will "likely allow for increased infrastructure and staffing to achieve a higher level of enforcement." According to the report, authorities also predict the net migration loss will see certain sectors of the economy experience "unexpectedly weak economic activity," specifically businesses that serve affected immigrant populations. "The slowdown implies weaker employment, GDP, and consumer spending growth," the report states, adding that consumer spending is expected to fall by between $60 billion and $110 billion over 2025 and 2026."

"The enemy fought with savage fury, and met death with all its horrours, without shrinking or complaining: not one asked to be spared, but fought as long as they could stand or sit."

"They wanted this iron fist to command them."

"In 1814 we took a little trip Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip. We took a little bacon an' we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British at the town of New Orleans."

"I charge you before God ... that you follow me no farther than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded, I am very confident, the Lord has more truths yet to break forth out of His holy word."

"In the name of God, Amen; We, ... the loyall subjects of our dread soveraigne King James, ... haveing undertaken, for the glorie of God, and advancemente of the Christian faith and honor of our king and countrie, a voyage to plant the first colonie in the Northerne parte of Virginia, doe, by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civill body politick, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and, by vertue heareof, to enacte, constitute, and frame, such just and equall laws, ordenanrcs, acts, constitutions and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meete and convenient for the generall good of the Colonie."

"The hospitals [of England] are full of the ancient ... the almshouses are filled with old laborers. Many there are who get their living with bearing burdens; but more are fain to burden the land with their whole bodies. Neither come these straits upon men always through intemperance, ill-husbandry, indiscretion, etc.; but even the most wise, sober, and discreet men go often to the wall when they have done their best. ... The rent-taker lives on sweet morsels, but the rent-payer eats a dry crust often with watery eyes."

"We are all freeholders; the rent day doth not trouble us."

"Let it not be grievous unto you that you have been instruments to break the ice for others who come after with less difficulty; the honor shall be yours to the world’s end."

"I deem it a great thing for a nation, in all the periods of its fortunes, to be able to look back to a race of founders and a principle of institution in which it might seem to see the realized idea of true heroism. That felicity, that pride, that help, is ours."

"The compact signed in the cabin of the "Mayflower" tells the story of their coming hither. A band of exiles, three thousand miles of ocean separating them from the land of their nativity, and the unknown and unexplored wilds of New England to be from thence and forevermore their home, they declare the purpose of their coming "to plant a colony for the glory of God, the advancement of the Christian faith, and the honor of their king." No sordid purpose is here disclosed. In these words and lofty sentiments we read their future history."

"One righteous word for Law—the common will; One living truth of Faith—God regnant still; One primal test of Freedom—all combined; One sacred Revolution—change of mind; One trust unfailing for the night and need— The tyrant-flower shall cast the freedom-seed. So held they firm, the Fathers aye to be, From Home to Holland, Holland to the sea— Pilgrims for manhood, in their little ship, Hope in each heart and prayer on every lip. They could not live by king-made codes and creeds; They chose the path where every footstep bleeds. Protesting, not rebelling; scorned and banned; Through pains and prisons harried from the land; Through double exile,—till at last they stand Apart from all,—unique, unworldly, true, Selected grain to sow the earth anew; A winnowed part—a saving remnant they; Dreamers who work—adventurers who pray!"

"Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, Began the kingdom not of kings, but men: Began the making of the world again. Here centuries sank, and from the hither brink A new world reached and raised an old-world link, When English hands, by wider vision taught, Threw down the feudal bars the Normans brought, And here revived, in spite of sword and stake, Their ancient freedom of the Wapentake! Here struck the seed—the Pilgrims' roofless town, Where equal rights and equal bonds were set, Where all the people equal-franchised met; Where doom was writ of privilege and crown; Where human breath blew all the idols down; Where crests were nought, where vulture flags were furled, And common men began to own the world."

"What keeps the herd from running, stampeding far and wide? The cowboy's long, low whistle and singing by their side."