NumQuotes=106 BEGIN_QUOTE The country lends itself to that type of guerrilla warfare in which a poorly armed peasant population can deploy itself against overwhelming odds. -- Charles Fenn END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE No matter how tough the job is, the American soldier gets the job done. He might hate the hell out of it, but he never quits. In Hamburger Hill, they might have grumbled, but my God they were there when the chips were down. They eventually went up that hill and took it! -- Col. Joseph B. Conmy, Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE My solution to the problem [Vietnam] would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. -- Gen. Curtis E. LeMay END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The Americans are much stronger than the French, though they know us less well. So it perhaps may take 10 years to do it, but our heroic compatriots in the South will defeat them in the end. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It is soldiers who pay most of the human cost. In war it is extraordinary how it all comes down to the character of one man. -- Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE While we are guarding the country, we must accept being the guardian of the finest ethics. The country needs it and we must do it. -- Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It is never very crowded at the front. -- Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE They've got us surrounded again, the poor bastards. -- Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Our goal should be to develop leaders who make the difference between winning and losing. -- Gen. Creighton Abrams Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE I don't mind being called tough since I find in this racket it's the tough guys who lead the survivors. -- Gen. Curtis E. LeMay END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE War is fear cloaked in courage. -- Gen. William Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. -- Gen. William Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The military don't start wars. The politicians start wars. -- Gen. William Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 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 Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country. -- Gen. William Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Without question the amount of firepower put on that piece of real estate exceeded anything that has ever been seen before in history by any foe and the enemy was hurt, his back was broken, by airpower. -- Gen. William Westmoreland END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Time is the condition to be won to defeat the enemy. Time ranks first among the three factors necessary for victory, coming before terrain and support of the people. Only with time can we defeat the enemy. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE I think I know the American people and I don't understand how they can support their involvement in this war. Is the Statue of Liberty standing on her head? -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE I was a Communist, but I am no longer one. I am a member of the Vietnamese family, nothing else. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We have been fighting for our independence for more than 25 years, and of course we cherish peace, but we will never surrender our independence to purchase a peace with the United States or any party. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE You must know of our resolution. Not even your nuclear weapons would force us to surrender after so long and violent a struggle for the independence of our country. -- Ho Chi Minh END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The battle for Xuan Loc produced one of the epic battles of any of the Indochina wars, certainly the most heroic stand in Indochina War III...In this final epic stand ARVN demonstrated for the last time that, when properly led, it had the 'right stuff'. -- Lt. Gen. Phillip B. Davidson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Never before had the Vietnamese enemy carried the fight to an American Army unit with such tenacity. None of the common wisdom born of the American experience in Vietnam to date applied to this enemy. We were locked in a savage battle, of fire and maneuver, a battle for survival, which only one side would be permitted to win. --Lt. Col. Harold G. Moore END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Follow me if I advance! Kill me if I retreat! Revenge me if I die! -- Ngo Dinh Diem END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE When marching leave no tracks, when cooking make no smoke, when resting build no house. -- NVA Slogan END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Many times the recruiters for the NVA would come into a village, take the oldest person and string him up, slit his stomach open and let the wild pigs eat him alive while he was dying. Then say, 'Who wants to come with us?' God help you if you don't. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Making do with a bad situation is what it was all about. Making do with nothing, on your own. You get young kids, throw them into general chaos, they make do with it. You get stable right away, or you don't make it at all. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It became a way of life. I didn't even know where those shells were going. I didn't even know what they was. But every death sound there is, you start to detect it-you know it. You start to know if death is going over you or if it's coming right at you. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It ran through my mind for a moment, 'Did his mother feel something, did his father feel something, did anybody? Was she reaching for a can of peas in the supermarket and feel a tug or a jolt and not know what it was? Does anybody close to him know that he just died?' -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Then the sun would go down and I could feel my stomach sinking. There goes the light. There goes one of your senses, the most important one. Life stops. There's no electricity. There's no technology. It's just hovels made out of corrugated tin and Coke boxes, cardboard, sticks, thatch. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE One day during a fire fight, for the first time in my life, I heard the cries of the Vietnamese wounded, and I understood them. When somebody gets wounded, they call out for their mothers, their wives, their girlfriends. There I was listening to the VC cry for the same things. That's when the futility of the war really dawned on me. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We got back. We was all out of breath. The first thing they did was, they started laughing. I'm looking at these nuts and then I'm laughing with them. That's when you find out that laughing at death is laughing that you made it alive. You faced it, dealt with it and survived. All of a sudden, it's a joke. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We fought from house to house and street to street. When we had to go inside a house we'd just shoot inside with our rifles and then the M60. Then we had to go up into the house and make sure they were dead. We didn't have no flame throwers. I didn't see no tanks in Saigon. We just had to shoot down the door, walk in and shoot the person down. -- U.S. Soldier END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It became necessary to destroy the town to save it. -- U.S. Army major END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 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. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The power of an air force is terrific when there is nothing to oppose it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Nothing is easy in war. Mistakes are always paid for in casualties and troops are quick to sense any blunders made by their comrades. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Morale is the greatest single factor in successful wars. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Pessimism never won any battle. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE I say we are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle, the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and 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. -- Frances Fitzgerald END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come. -- George McGovern END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. These events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America's leadership in the world. -- Gerald Ford END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE There are always three choices - war, surrender, and present policy. -- Henry Kissinger END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. -- Henry Kissinger END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We believe that peace is at hand. -- Henry Kissinger END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war. -- Jeane Kirkpatrick END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE ...If we withdrew from Vietnam, the Communists would control Vietnam. Pretty soon Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya would go. -- John F. Kennedy END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Should I become President...I will not risk American lives...by permitting any other nation to drag us into the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time through an unwise commitment that is unwise militarily, unnecessary to our security and unsupported by our allies. -- John F. Kennedy END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place. -- John F. Kennedy END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The troops will march in, the bands will play, the crowds will cheer, and in four days everyone will have forgotten. Then we will be told we have to send in more troops. It's like taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another. -- John F. Kennedy END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war, we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE If one little old general in shirt sleeves can take Saigon, think about 200 million Chinese comin' down those trails. No sir, I don't want to fight them. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It is always a strain when people are being killed. I don't think anybody has held this job who hasn't felt personally responsible for those being killed. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 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 END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Our objective in South Vietnam has never been the annihilation of the enemy. It has been to bring about a recognition in Hanoi that its objective--taking over the South by force--could not be achieved. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE ...If this little nation goes down the drain and can't maintain her independence, ask yourself, what's going to happen to all the other little nations? -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We still seek no wider war. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE This is not a jungle war, but a struggle for freedom on every front of human activity. -- Lyndon B. Johnson END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE If the Americans do not want to support us anymore, let them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises! -- Nguyen Van Thieu END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. -- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE A nation cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends. -- Richard M. Nixon END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE If in order to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia and particularly in Indo-China, if in order to avoid it we must take the risk by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch of the government has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision. -- Richard M. Nixon END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. -- Richard M. Nixon END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home for Christmas. -- Ronald Reagan END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE We are at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it has been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. -- Ronald Reagan END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE This war has already stretched the generation gap so wide that it threatens to pull the country apart. -- Sen. Frank Church END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic. -- Richard M. Nixon END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 9,087,000 military personnel served on active duty during the Vietnam Era. (August 5, 1964 - May 7, 1975). END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 2,594,000 personnel served within the borders of South Vietnam between January 1, 1965 to March 28, 1973. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 7,484 women served in Vietnam. 6,250 or 83.5 percent were nurses. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE U.S. troop strength in Vietnam peaked at 543,432 on 30 April 1968. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 150,375 of the 303,704 people who were awarded purple hearts during Vietnam were hospitalized. (49.5 percent) END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The average age of a KIA (Killed in action) during the Vietnam War was 23.11 years old. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 97 percent of all people who participated in the Vietnam War were discharged under honorable conditions. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE One out of every ten Americans who served in Vietnam was a casualty. 58,169 were killed and approximately 304,000 were wounded out of the 2.59 million who served. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Amputation or crippling wounds to the lower extremities were 300 percent higher during Vietnam than in WWII and 70 percent higher than in Korea. Multiple amputations occurred at the rate of 18.4 percent compared to 5.7 percent in WWII. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 82 percent of veterans who saw heavy combat during Vietnam, strongly believe the war was lost because of a lack of political will. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The last man drafted for the Vietnam War was drafted June 30, 1973. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The fall of Saigon happened April 30, 1975. Two years AFTER the American military left Vietnam. The last American troops departed in their entirety March 29, 1973. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE An estimated 925,000 VietCong were killed during the Vietnam War. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE An estimated 8,000,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War. (4 times that of the WWII amount) END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE An estimated 600 million dollars in damage was caused to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, at a cost to America of 6 billion dollars. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE An estimated 2,000,000 hectares of forest were destroyed in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE An estimated 19,020,000 gallons of the highly toxic herbicides Orange, White and Blue were sprayed on 16 percent of South Vietnam's land area. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The youngest US soldier killed in Vietnam was 16. The oldest soldier killed was 62. 11,465 of the 58,169 KIA's during Vietnam were less than 20 years old. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE The first soldier to die in combat in Vietnam was James Davis, in 1958. He was with the 509th Radio Research Station. Davis Station in Saigon was named for him. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE From 1957 to 1973, the National Liberation Front assassinated 36,725 South Vietnamese and abducted another 58,499. The death squads focused on leaders at the village level and on anyone who improved the lives of the peasants such as medical personnel, social workers, and school teachers. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Myth: Most Vietnam veterans were drafted. Fact: Two-thirds of the men who served in Vietnam were volunteers. (Two-thirds of the men who served in World War II were drafted). END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Myth: A disproportionate number of blacks were killed in the Vietnam War. Fact: 86.3 percent of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasian (including Hispanics) 12.5 percent were black. 1.2 percent belonged to other races. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Myth: The war was fought largely by the poor and uneducated. Fact: 76 percent of the men sent to Vietnam were from lower/middle working class backgrounds. 79 percent of the men who served in 'Nam had a high school education or better. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Myth: The fighting in Vietnam was not as intense as in World War II. Fact: The average infantryman in Vietnam saw about 240 days of combat in one year thanks to the mobility of the helicopter. Fact: The average infantryman in the South Pacific during World War II saw about 40 days of combat in four years. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE MEDEVAC helicopters flew nearly 500,000 missions and airlifted over 900,000 patients. The average time lapse between wounding to hospitalization was less than one hour. As a result, less than one percent of all Americans wounded who survived the first 24 hours died. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Approximately 12,000 helicopters saw action in Vietnam (in all services). END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Army UH-1's totaled 7,531,955 flight hours in Vietnam between October 1966 and the end of December 1975. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Army AH-1G's totaled 1,038,969 flight hours in Vietnam. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Of the 2.59 million who served, between 1 and 1.6 million (40-60 percent) either fought in combat, provided close combat support, or were at least fairly regularly exposed to enemy attack. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE Helicopter crew deaths accounted for 10 percent of all Vietnam deaths. Helicopter losses during Lam Son 719 (a two month operation) accounted for 10 percent of all helicopter losses from 1961-1975. END_QUOTE BEGIN_QUOTE 997 Veterans were killed on their first day in Vietnam 1,148 Veterans were killed on their last day in Vietnam END_QUOTE