The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one si...de won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the so...ldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You have a row of dominoes set up; you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very... quickly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of wo...men, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country--it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks a...nd hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels' wives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us put an end to self-inflicted wounds. Let us remember that our national unity is a most priceless asset. Let us deny our adv...ersaries the satisfaction of using Vietnam to pit Americans against Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America has made no reparation to the Vietnamese, nothing. We are the richest people in the world and they are among the poorest. ...We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them help--because the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it s...hould remember it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »