At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.
In Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.
Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.
Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.
In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.
America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, profess...
Don't underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn't shut you down from the moment.
During Vietnam, I was in college, enjoying my student deferment. The government wisely felt that, in my case, military service was less important than completing my studies to prepare me for my chosen career: comedian.
I used to love going into local hardware stores, to look at little things they made locally. Nowadays it's harder, though you can still do it in Vietnam.
I'd like President Bush to think maybe there's another way to think, that maybe Kissinger was wrong when he says we had to go in there because he was wrong about Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh and Vietnam were perfect for Lyndon Johnson: 220 million against 18 million, water buffalo and all. No risk, really.
Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
I was counsel on the full veterans committee, the first Vietnam veteran to serve as a full-committee counsel in Congress. It stunned me that there was a 600,000-case backlog of claims. During my time in the Senate, it became 900,000.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of nati...
It seems to be that when these communist regimes take over - if you look at the example of Vietnam or Cambodia or Nicaragua - that even in conditions of peace they don't seem to be able to figure out how to support their people, and the human sufferi...
Willard: [voice-over-] Oh man... the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it.
I think the new generations in America, the America's youth, no longer care about Vietnam. They don't want to hear any more about it.
I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.
Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.
As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion - and I worried about it.
It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
