Vietnam Diary Quotes

I slowly dug a stand-up foxhole up to my neck using my helmet. I don't think any of us slept that night. It was the first time in my tour when I wasn't sure I would make it. I'm not ashamed to say I did a lot of thinking about home and a lot of praying to the man upstairs. ~ Lanny Starr

Not all days in the field were unhappy ones. You had to have fun sometimes or you would go crazy. ~ Lanny Starr

One way of feeling infallible is not to keep a diary ~ George Orwell

Issues are like tissues. You pull one out and another appears! ~ Gary Goldstein

Lying on the front passenger seat, as if it didn't matter, was Rose's Diary.
It Mattered. ~ Caroline B. Cooney

I know of no trunk full of old heirlooms, no felt hats or army uniforms. There are no tarnished medals or gold watches. I've stopped dreaming of discovering the old shoe box filled with the history of our family, the documents and letters that recorded our family's arrival and the historical milestones as my grandfathers left their mark on a place. There is no journal or diary. I do not know if they knew how to read or write. I could easily dismiss their existence. Their lives seem empty and still, void of emotion. I cannot tell if they wear scars. I only know of my grandfathers as broken old men. ~ David Mas Masumoto

No one must know that my heart and mind are constantly at war with each other. Up to know reason has always won the battle, but will my emotions get the upper hand? Sometimes I fear they will, but more often I actually hope they do! ~ Anne Frank

You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky" and etc. etc. It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? ~ David Foster Wallace

Dad on Child-rearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollboth outside Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you're ultimately set loose upon the world..." He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. "I suspect you'll have no choice but to go down in history. ~ Marisha Pessl

Yet Nancy Wexler's obsession with finding the gene was driven by her desire to mend it or cure it when she did find it. And she is undoubtedly closer to that goal now than ten years ago. 'I am an optimist', she writes, 'Even though I feel this hiatus in which we will be able only to predict and not to prevent will be exceedingly difficult .. . I believe the knowledge will be worth the risks.'
What of Nancy Wexler herself? Several times in the late 1980s, she and her elder sister Alice sat down with their father Milton to discuss whether either of the women should take the test. The debates were tense, angry and inconclusive. Milton was against taking the test, stressing its uncertainties and the danger of a false diagnosis. Nancy had been determined that she wanted the test, but her determination gradually evaporated in the face of a real possibility. Alice chronicled the discussions in a diary that later became a soulsearching book called Mapping fate. The result was that neither woman took the test. Nancy is now the same age as her mother was when she was diagnosed. ~ Matt Ridley

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it? ~ S. Kelley Harrell

Who today reflects that in the Battle of the Somme alone, where every man was an eager volunteer of 'Kitchener's Army', more British lives were lost than in the whole of the Second World War? Or that in the first day's fighting of any major attack on the Western Front, more men were killed than the Americans lost in eight years fighting in Vietnam? - 31,000 at the time these words are written. The average man and woman of today is not interested in such profitless comparisons. Modern life does not want to hear about these inconceivable calamities of the past. ~ Arthur Stanley Gould Lee

I made the record that my life had me make. Each one is like a diary. ~ Lenny Kravitz

The diary ended unfinished, unseen by any who deserved to read it.
Only Elara saw its pages, and the slow unraveling of the woman inside.

She destroyed the book like she destroyed Coriane.
Still she dreamed of nothing. ~ Victoria Aveyard

People that spend time in a foxhole - they're never going to find that relationship anywhere else again ... Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets - more than even the Vietnam vets - there's a brotherhood. ~ Sylvester Stallone

They were at the wrong place at the wrong time naturally they became heroes ~ George Lucas

We didn't lose Vietnam. We quit Vietnam. ~ Alexander Haig

Memories particularly of when they weren't being what parents are nine-tenths of the time, the taskmasters, the examples, the moral authorities, the nags of pick-that-up and you're-going-to-be-late, keepers of the diary of her duties and routines, memories, rather, of when they found one another afresh, beyond the tensions between parental mastery and inept childish uncertainty, of those moments of respite in a family's life when they could reach one another in calm ~ Philip Roth

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see? ~ Orson Welles

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition. ~ James Nachtwey

In my childhood diary I wrote: I have decided that it is better not to love anyone, because when you love people, then you have to be separated from them, and that hurts too much. ~ Anais Nin

They faced each other in silence for a long minute, both of them clearly uncomfortable. He hated all the awkwardness between them.
To hell with that. He smiled at her. "So do I get to know what's in that diary?"
She blushed crimson. "That diary got you into this mess. You could have been killed. How can you joke about it?"
"No joke. I'm sincerely interested." An understatement. He would have given his antique baseball bat collection to know what she'd written about him ten years ago.
"I was a foolish teenager."
"And now?" He stepped closer. ~ Dana Marton

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive. ~ Sara Sheridan

The poets and philosophers I once loved had it wrong. Death does not come to us all, nor does the passage of time dim our memories and reduce our bodies to dust. Because while I was considered dead, and a headstone had been engraved with my name, in truth my life was just beginning. ~ Kevin Williamson

World War II brought the Greatest Generation together. Vietnam tore the Baby Boomers apart. ~ Jim Webb

My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War. ~ Joel Kinnaman

The conclusion that many uniformed military came away from Vietnam with was that political interference, dominance of strategy and even tactics were a very bad way to conduct a war, and that indeed, if that was going to be our practice, that we shouldn't wage conflict again. ~ Robert McFarlane

Keeping a diary is advanced-level living. I spend way too much time trying not to curl up in the corner like a giant fetus & weep to keep a diary. ~ Alissa Nutting

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick [Nolte] to Albert [Finney] to Omar [Epps] to Barbara [Hershey]. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War. ~ Bruce Willis

The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that. ~ Robert Hass

The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed. ~ Robert McNamara

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'. ~ David Icke

Somewhere on the periphery of that total Vietnam issue whose daily reports made the morning paper too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men, a hideous war and all kinds of victims. ~ Michael Herr

The lessons I learned in Vietnam and in the NFL reinforced one another:
teamwork, sacrifice, responsibility, accountability, and leadership. ~ Rocky Bleier

There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government. ~ Bruce Schneier

I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling. ~ Valerie Fitzgerald

God willing, the occupation forces will be driven out as happened in Vietnam. ~ Muqtada Al Sadr

We were against the war in Vietnam and for voter registration and social issues. Everybody has their choices, and the obligation of a comedian is first to entertain. And if you're so inclined, and you have some bigger thought, make sure you express it, because that's a gift. ~ Tom Smothers

As a boy, he'd always had some elaborate project that had nothing to do with school. On Summit Avenue, alone in his aerie, he drew the stately homes across the street and numbered the many windows and doors, compiling a detailed log of his neighbors' activities. In sixth grade, simultaneously, he kept a diary concerning the girls he liked and a ledger chronicling every penny he made and spent. These secret fascinations led nowhere in the end, were left mysteriously incomplete like the detective novel he patterned after Sherlock Holmes, to be replaced by his next obsession. At Princeton, when he was supposed to be cramming for exams, he wrote a musical. In the army it was a novel. Nothing had changed. He was still that boy, happiest pursuing some goose chase of his own making, and lost without one. ~ Stewart O'Nan

What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism - namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar 'movement' with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say - two years later, in 1969 - so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were 'giving aid and comfort to the enemy.' What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war - they made that war last longer. That's what I saw. ~ John Irving

Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures, and honorary doctorate degrees from Manchester University and Liverpool University.
'It is an utterly corrupt society,' she wrote in her diary, '. . . & I will take nothing that it can give me ~ Jane Goldman

I recommend keeping a diary. Diaries are cool. ~ Danny Wallace

Norman Morrison soaked himself in petrol and burned himself on the steps of the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam war...Would it perhaps have taken greater courage to set fire to the President? A body of men who sleep soundly on a daily programme of sanctioned mass-murder are surely only distrubed by personal danger. ~ Jeff Nuttall

To me, Columbine is just as awful as Vietnam, and it's just as awful as anything else. ~ Marilyn Manson

I'm not going to be the first American president to lose a war. ~ Richard M. Nixon

It is on those mist-filled nights, when the wind is strong and curious, when the air is alive with something unseen but felt, that you finally believe ... oh, yes, you finally believe what your heart has always known: magic is real and it is everywhere. - Diary of a Pagan ~ J.R. Rain

After Vietnam, the Democrats became fundamentally the anti-military as a party. ~ Heather Wilson

That's the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come out right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. ~ Anne Frank