History Of The United States

"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 So when the Convention was being planned—Lyndon Johnson did not attend, having withdrawn from the race in March, but he was very much in charge—pains were taken to incommode the news media as much as possible."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.’”"

"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 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."

"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.""

"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."

"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’."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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"

"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""