Vietnam War

"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."