History Of The United States

"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?"

"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."

"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."