#vietnam

Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward his destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. People glare at one another and fight for maneuvering space. All parties are equally determined to get the right-of-way--insist on it. They swerve away at the last possible moment, giving scant inches to spare. The victor goes forwards, no time for a victory grin, already engaging in another contest of will. Saigon traffic is Vietnamese life, a continuous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders. ↗

— Andrew X. Pham

#motorcycles #saigon #traffic #vietnam #equality

We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy's young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship" in the defense of freedom. We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truely the future he had envisioned for us. ↗

— Joseph L. Galloway

#vietnam-war #freedom

It seems like our town has closed down these days leading up to the funeral. Old people still sit on their porches and talk, but their conversations aren't sprinkled with laughter anymore. Since the new, little kids haven't played outside, as if their moms are afraid someone might snatch them out of their yards and send them off to war. ↗

— Kimberly Willis Holt

#death #friendship #vietnam-war #age

I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#vietnam #war #life

I hate being told I can't do something because I'm a girl! ↗

— Thanhha Lai

#insideoutandbackagain #life #love #refugees #saigon

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead. ↗

— Tim O'Brien

#war #justice

Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#america #bombs #communism #communists #vietnam

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind. ↗

— William Westmoreland

#censorship #confused #ever #first #fought

I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there. ↗

— Birch Bayh

#age #being #congress #die #enough

It seems to me the American people never really forgave the Democrats for being right about Vietnam. ↗

— Paul Begala

#american #american people #being #democrats #forgave