“The worst nightmare I ever had about Vietnam was that I had to go back. I woke up in a sweat, in total terror.”
Oliver Stone
“Vietnam was an exercise in mistaken idealism; Iraq in cynical money-making. And there's no optimism or idealism now -- Americans are tired of knowledge. Our leaders, the C-students from Yale, know this. We're proud of being ignorant; that leaves virtue at our core. We aren't frazzled by knowledge like foreigners, so we can be trusted.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.”
Lyndon B. Johnson
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
Richard M. Nixon
“Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam.”
Marshall McLuhan
“I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.”
Gen William C. Westmoreland
“Within the soul of each Vietnam veteran there is probably something that says "Bad war, good soldier." Only now are Americans beginning to separate the war from the warrior.”
Max Cleland
