Vietnam War

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."