Vietnam War Memorial Quotes

Our lives are a story shaped by circumstance, twisted by Fate, and ultimately judged by how we reacted. ~ Mary Marchese

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was. ~ Maya Lin

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief. ~ Adrienne Rich

Vietnam was the first time that Americans of different races had to depend on each other. In the Second World War, they were segregated; it was in Vietnam that American integration happened in the military - and it wasn't easy. ~ Karl Marlantes

History of America, Part I (1776-1966): Declaration of Independence, Constitutional Convention, Louisiana Purchase, Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, Great Depression, New Deal, World War II, TV, Cold war, civil-rights movement, Vietnam. History of America, Part II (1967-present): the Super Bowl era. The Super Bowl has become Main Street's Mardi Gras. ~ Norman Chad

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal. ~ Conrad Black

Dare I ask Mao and his Communist Party?
I fear my throat will be cut into two pieces.
In the name of revolution, for thought crimes,
Such questions can turn me to ashes. ~ Zoe S. Roy

The United States can certainly defeat North Vietnam, but the United States cannot defeat a guerrilla war which is being raged from a sanctuary through a pattern of penetration, intervention, evasion, which is very difficult for a technologically advanced country like the United States to combat. ~ Zbigniew Brzezinski

This war in Vietnam is, I believe, a war for civilization. Certainly it is not a war of our seeking. It is a war thrust upon us and we cannot yield to tyranny. ~ Francis Spellman

Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development. We had been forced to adapt to ten years of living in a bubble economy pumped up purely by American imports; three decades of on-again, off-again war, including the sawing in half of the country in '54 by foreign magicians and the brief Japanese interregnum of World War II; and the previous century of avuncular French molestation. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare. ~ Michael Ignatieff

And it was dark
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we'd write
And we would all go down together ~ Billy Joel

The Vietnam War was happening, but Lubbock was ... They put a pinch on it. ~ Bob Livingston

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

One of the lessons of Vietnam, which we failed to heed in the Iraq war and the Afghanistan surge, is that before you commit U.S. military forces to aid or assist, it is essential to know what you want them to achieve. ~ Kathleen Troia McFarland

Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.
That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

Don't step off the road --- There might be another one! ~ James McGarrity

The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies. ~ Robert Koger

Helvetica is the font of the Vietnam War. ~ Paula Scher

Nixon's genius was that he was able to portray himself as the toughest of the anti-communists, and yet run on a platform that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. And, of course, his plan was to prolong it until his second election - but he didn't tell us that then. ~ Harry Shearer

The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition. ~ Sylvester Stallone

My dad [Johnny Cash] went to the [Richard] Nixon White House and refused to sing "Welfare Cadillac" (instead performing the anti-war songs "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black"). He protested the Vietnam War, but he went to perform for the troops with bombs dropping all around him. He had that kind of genius: a true artist's capacity for holding two opposing thoughts at once while being large enough to encompass all realities. ~ Rosanne Cash

I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good. You don't know what a media freak is until you've seen the way a few of those grunts would run around during a fight when they knew that there was a television crew nearby; they were actually making war movies in their heads, doing little guts-and-glory Leatherneck tap dances under fire, getting their pimples shot off for the networks. They were insane, but the war hadn't done that to them. Most combat troops stopped thinking of the war as an adventure after their first few firefights, but there were always the ones who couldn't let that go, these few who were up there doing numbers for the cameras ... We'd all seen too many movies, stayed too long in Television City, years of media glut had made certain connections difficult. ~ Michael Herr

I would like to ask a question. Would this sort of war or savage bombing which has taken place in Vietnam have been tolerated for so long, had the people been European? ~ Indira Gandhi

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

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

The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment. ~ Norman Cousins

If wars create vast sums of money for the global elite, is it possible the Soviets, the Viet Cong and Muslim extremists were, or are, also fabricated enemies of the West along with North Korea? Or at least exaggerated threats? ~ James Morcan

The jungle changes a man. ~ Cynthia Kadohata

Neoconservatives and the Pentagon have good reason to fear the return of the Vietnam Syndrome. The label intentionally suggests a disease, a weakening of the martial will, but the syndrome was actually a healthy American reaction to false White House promises of victory, the propping up of corrupt regimes, crony contracting and cover-ups of civilian casualties during the Vietnam War that are echoed today in the news from Baghdad. ~ Tom Hayden

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. ~ Richard M. Nixon

If Americans can transform Memorial Day, technically a remembrance of all our war dead ever, into the official kickoff of summer, we can handle adapting one demoralizing battle into a wholesome, chipper get-together. ~ Sarah Vowell

Many of us, whether in the jungles of Asia or on the streets of Chicago, had discovered that noble causes can lead to ignoble actions and that we were capable of sacrificing honor to a sense of efficacy. ~ Linda Grant

Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn't until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon. ~ Jody Williams

We sit at our consoles and play "Gears of War", but we don't see images from war. We don't turn on the news and see the evidence of war, the result of war. Maybe twice a year, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, we'll go out, we'll hang our flags, we'll try to inculcate in our children some sense of national honor for the fallen. But really, we don't see it. We just don't see the pictures. There's no drive-by on the freeway of death up close. So we don't really see bravery. ~ Jamie Lee Curtis