[Describing Vietnam] Forrest Gump: We was always taking long walks, and we was always looking for a guy named "Charlie".
[Refering to Vietnam] Chris Taylor: Somebody once wrote, "Hell is the impossibility of reason." That's what this place feels like. Hell.
Max Fischer: So you were in Vietnam? Herman Blume: Yeah. Max Fischer: Were you in the shit? Herman Blume: Yeah, I was in the shit.
Nature did not gift us with a mighty Mekong like Thailand and Vietnam, with their vast and naturally fertile plains. Nature instead put our islands ahead of our neighbours in the path of typhoons from the Pacific.
I think Operation Smile is in more than 22 countries, mostly Third World. It just happened that my schedule opened up at the time they were heading to Vietnam.
By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?
In point of fact all Americans are automatically turned down by China these days because of the escalation of Johnson's war in Vietnam, which several times has intruded into China.
If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.
Nixon did have a secret plan, and I knew that it involved making threats of nuclear war to North Vietnam.
Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam.
It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.
World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart.
With Vietnam, the Iraq War, so many American films about war are almost always from the American point of view. You almost never have a Middle Eastern character by name with a story.
So one important lesson of Vietnam is, the first casualty of an unwise and unjust war are the American troops called on to fight it. Their service should be honored.
I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.
Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
I thought, Dad. Could I go to Vietnam for you? Dad, I could do it. I could do it for you. I could go to the places you fought. I could find the bits and pieces of your heart and soul left behind. If I bring them back, would it heal your pain? Dad, yo...
Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.
The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important 'cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.
If my name were Nubby Blues, I wouldn't be a jazz musician, I'd be a disabled Vietnam vet on welfare.
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.
