"We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of Indo-Chinese territory and from Southeast Asia."

President Dwight Eisenhower (Aug 4,1953)

"It is rich in many raw materials such as tin, oil, rubber and iron ore....This area has great strategic value....It has major naval and air bases."

Secretary of State Dulles (Mar 29,1954)

"George, you're crazier than hell."

          -John F. Kennedy (President of the U.S.) ridiculing Undersecretary of State George ball's warning that a decision to follow Taylor's advice and send more American troops to Vietnam "could lead in five years' time to an involvement of 300,000 men." Nov 1961

"Some others are eager to enlarge the conflict....They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do....Such action would offer no solution at all to the real problem of Vietnam....The South Vietnamese have the basic responsibility for the defense of their own freedom."

-Lyndon Johnson (1964)

"These....are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem"

-Lyndon Johnson (when lighting the national Christmas tree in Dec 1964)

"Johnson called the South Vietnamese those 'poor little boogers...We're going to liberate those poor little boogers, and I'll be known as the great emancipator."

-Ronald Kessler

Inside The White House

"Macmillan said that when military leaders raised questions about the wisdom of Johnson' policies in Vietnam, the president brushed them off.

"He had an attitude of, 'Don't confuse me with facts, my mind is made up,' " he said. "When they tried to steer him away from something, he would unload on them and let them know who was chief."

-Ronald Kessler

Inside The White House

"The situation in Vietnam is deteriorating and without new U.S. action defeat appears inevitable...the stakes in Vietnam are extremely high....The international prestige of the United States, and a substantial part of our influence are directly at risk in Vietnam....Any negotiated withdrawal would mean surrender on the installment plan."

-General Maxwell Taylor

"American intervention was not a progress sucked step by step into an unsuspected quagmire. At no time were policy-makers unaware of the hazards, obstacles and negative developments. American intelligence was adequate, informed observation flowed steadily from the field to the capital, special investigative missions were repeatedly sent out, independent reportage to balance professional optimism-when that prevailed-was never lacking. The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable."

-Barbara Tuchman

"Logistically, the Vietnam War was absurd. For the Americans, it wove inanity with mortality. Nothing was discrete; everything was interconnected. There were no definite zones, and there was no defensible position. (the DMZ was an idea, a superimposed and unsuccessful Cartesian fantasy.) There was only the technology of war and the technology of telecommunication.

In Vietnam, the human organism, vulnerable and savage, was in a jungle on all levels: an amoral ideological jungle, a visual jungle, and a microbial jungle where the margins between predator and parasite blurred, where leeches in rice paddies drew as much blood as did enemy sniper fire. It was a war of sappers, of individual initiative, a phantasmagoria of cultural colonialism and pain. And all of this fed the ghost empire of Western media, so apparently solid, so ever-present, and yet so discorporate. The immediacy of the conflict made it seem to the television viewer back in America as if Vietnam were a geographic extension of Hawaii, or perhaps a part of California that was held by hostile forces.

Vietnam was also a confrontation between the twentieth century and primitive culture, between American soldiers newly tribalized by electronic media, and indigenous jungle peoples operating under the imperative of a nineteenth-century political ideology. (The American campaign in Vietnam was a casualty of a technological Maginot Syndrome-namely, that a new technology is sometimes vulnerable to primitive technologies. A later example of this was an incident that occurred during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, just before the crisis, sensitive intelligence documents in the American embassy were shredded. Iranian rug weavers, however, painstakingly reconstructed the shredded CIA documents. Exacting and plentiful hand labor-a medieval technology-overcame high-tech CIA shredders, much to the eventual embarrassment of the CIA) Vietnam was infrared night scopes and jellied gasoline versus bamboo spikes poisoned with feces, carpet-bombing versus underground tunnels. It was the interface of bodies with machines, and the disastrous intersection of flesh with metal moving at high velocities. It was about the vulnerability of flesh, the adaptability of flesh versus the irreducible inflexibility of metal.

Vietnam was also the second contained war, the second major war, after the Korean War, that didn’t escalate into a world conflict. It was a demonstration of limited-theatre warfare, where modern superpower status didn’t ensure victory. It was also the beginning of the end of superpowers, not by direct defeat, but because any conflict subjected to the exaggerative power of the media becomes, by default , a global spectacle that we all participate in, if only as media bystanders.

Christopher Dewdney

Last Flesh

LBJ: "I stayed awake last night thinking of this, and I don't know why in the hell we-looks to me like we're getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don't see what we can ever hope to get out of this once we're committed."

McGeorge Bundy: "Once-

Johnson: "I believe that the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don't think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home. I don't think that it's worth fighting for, and I don't think that we can get out. It's just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw."

BUNDY: "It is an awful mess.

JOHNSON: "What is Laos worth to me? What is Laos worth to this country? We've got a treaty, but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and they're not doing anything about it."

BUNDY: "Yeah, yeah-

JOHNSON: "Of course, if you start running (from) the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen."

BUNDY: "Yeah, that's the trouble. If this thing comes apart with us-that's the dilemma, that's exactly the dilemma."

JOHNSON: "but this is a terrible thing that we're getting ready to do."

BUNDY: Mr. President, I'm not telling you today what I'd do in your position. I just think that the most we have to do with it is pray for a while."

JOHNSON: "Did you see the poll this morning? Sixty-five percent of them don't know anything about it, and of those who do, the majority think that we're mishandling it. But they don't know what to do."

BUNDY: "Yeah, yeah-

JOHNSON: "That's Gallup. It's damn easy to get into a war, but it's going to be harder to ever extricate yourself if we get in."

(From the transcript of a telephone call on May 27, 1964, between President Lyndon B. Johnson and McGeorge Bundy, his national security adviser. A year later. Johnson began the large-scale deployment of troops to Vietnam. The transcript was released in February by the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas)

"Going out at night the medics gave you pills, Dexedrine breath like dead snakes kept too long in a jar....I knew one 4th Division Lurp who took his pills by the fistful, downs from the left pocket of his tiger suit and ups from the right, one to cut the trail for him and the other to send him down it. He told me that they cooled things out just right for him, that he could see that old jungle at night like he was looking at it through a starlight scope 'They sure give you the range,' he said..."

"What makes the Vietnam veterans so somehow spooky? We could almost describe them as being "Unwholesomely mature." They have never had illusions about war. They are the first soldiers in history who knew even in childhood, from having herd and seen so many pictures of actual and restaged battles, that war is meaningless butchery of ordinary people like themselves."

   "The Vietnam war produced more than 400,000 less than honorable discharges. In the years 1965-1973, there were 229,798 general discharges, 162,919 undesirable, 27,292 bad conduct, and 2,865 dishonorable. Most of these discharges are not based on criminal activity but on such vague criteria as "character or behavior disorders." According to a Department of Defense study, 72 percent of all general discharges were for this class of offenses. Less than honorable discharges could be given for such offenses as "shirking," "inaptitude," "apathy" "enuresis (bed-wetting)," "alcoholism," "drug addiction, " homosexual and other aberrant tendencies," "unsanitary habits," and "financial irresponsibility."

Aryeh Neier

Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You

  "Vietnam produced opposition by soldiers and veterans on a scale and a fervor never seen before....Levels of prosecutions for resistance activities dramatically increased during the Vietnam War."

-Brian Willson

   "The Vietnam war killed 55,000 Americans, wounded another 300,000 and left behind over 400,000 veterans with bad discharges and a similar number with bad discharge codes. Richard Nixon's public adulation of the POWs not withstanding, the Vietnam veterans did not return like the conquering heroes who came back from earlier wars. Not for them were the fireboats, dancing girls, parades, and parties which bring back nostalgic memories to World War II veterans. the public dislike of the Vietnam war has rubbed off on its veterans.

   To be a veteran of World War II was to have an advantage in getting a job, not so with Vietnam veterans. Some employers distrust them as hawks who are to blame for the war. Other employers worry about whether they became addicted to drugs while in the service.

  Of 518 men held for trial in the Essex County Jail in Newark in September 1973, because of inability to afford bail, 35 percent were Vietnam-era veterans.

   The war was a loser, and its veterans are seen as losers. The biggest losers of them all are those stigmatized in the dossiers by bad discharges or honorable discharges with bad codes."

-Aryeh Neier

Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You

"A different sort of greeting awaited them from members of the Douglas MacArthur post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The VFW was staging its own counterdemonstration, replete with "In God We Trust" and "Why Lose?" signs and both American and Confederate flags.

   David McQueen, a national aide for the VFW, explained their presence. "This ground has been desecrated by these people (The Vietnam veterans) , and we wanted to make sure a few good Americans stood on it today."

   "Why don't you go to Hanoi? They need boys like you!" said one VFW member.

"We won our war, You see, these fellas didn't." explained another VFW member to the Bowling Green Films crew. "And from the looks of it. they couldn't win....

Gerald Nicosia

Home To War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans' Movement

   "VA doctors were informed that it was VA policy to initially deny all agent Orange disability claims and then to forward them to the Central Office for review. There were several deadly catches built into the system. The first was that headquarters could not approve an Agent Orange claim unless the veteran's service record verified herbicide exposure. The VA set this requirement knowing full well that almost no veterans (except for those few actually engaged in spraying the stuff) had "herbicide exposure' in their service records. The second catch was a memo from Cleland instructing his workers that there could be no certainty about Agent Orange's harmful effects for "another decade"-even though the government, thanks to several EPA studies, already knew quite a bit about the carcinogenic, teratogenic, and fetatoxic qualities of dioxin, which was a contaminant in Agent Orange. Reutershan's and McCarthy's letters asking the VA to conduct its own epidemiological study were politely ignored, as was a request by the National Veterans Law Center (NVLC).

   When McCarthy met with Cleland to push the idea of a VA study. Max told him: "No. Forget it. No way. We've got more important things. There's post-traumatic stress to deal with." In a similar vein, Cleland rejected the prospect of an outreach program to locate veterans who were experiencing unusual health problems-another proposal of the NVLC-with the curious logic that such an outreach program would only cause Vietnam vets "needless anxiety."

   The last, and worst, catch was a seeming compromise with Agent Orange claimants. Cleland encouraged all veterans with unexplained health problems to visit outpatient clinics for a medical evaluations. But at the same time, the VA issued a series of memos to the examining doctors informing them that "the likelihood of herbicide poisoning is virtually zero," and instructing them to offer troubled vets, "simple reassurance"! Even more treacherously, the VA warned its staff not to make any entries in the patient's medical record concerning Agent Orange-related complaints." unless unequivocal confirmation of such a connection has been established." And the VA, of course, had already set up guidelines that made it all but impossible for an "unequivocal confirmation" to be established."

-Gerald Nicosia

Home To War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement

"The largest mass toxic tort case in history, In re Agent Orange Product Liability Litigation, was played out against a backdrop even more sinister than the political infighting of Vietnam veterans. Always just offstage was the austere presence of that mammoth federal agency known as the Veterans Administration, which billed itself as the "true advocate of the veteran," and which posed before every governmental hearing as the ultimate authority on veterans'' affairs. The VA would spend more than a decade-till well after the lawsuit had fizzled into the history books-denying, or trying to deny, every Agent Orange disability claim that came across its desk."

-Gerald Nicosia

IBID

"The problems the Gulf War vets are dealing with, the VA and the government, it's almost a mirror of the way they treated us. First thing they do is tell them it's all in their head. Then they tell them it's all stress. Then they create a registry. Then they do studies. It's following the same damn poor rulebook that they did with Agent Orange...."

-Frank McCarthy

"An accurate description of the final month of North Vietnam’s final campaign would require a book in itself. I am not even sure if what occurred could be called a campaign; a migration, rather. The north Vietnamese Army simply rolled over the countryside, driving on to Saigon. Except for a brief, hopeless stand made by a single division at the provincial capital of Xuan Loc, the ARVN offered no significant resistance. The South Vietnamese Army broke into pieces. It dissolved. There were terrible scenes of panicked soldiers beating and trampling civilians as they fled from the advancing enemy. Late in the month, the atmosphere of disintegration became palpable. Not just an army, but an entire country was crumbling, collapsing before our eyes. The roads were jammed with refugees and routed soldiers. Some of the columns were twenty miles long, winding out of the hills and rubber plantations towards the flat marshlands around Saigon. They stretched along the roads for as far as we could see, processions that seemed to have no beginning and no end. They shambled in the rain and heat: barefoot civilians; soldiers whose boots were rotting on their feet, some still carrying their weapons and determined only to escape; lost children crying for their parents, parents for their children; wounded men covered with dried blood and filthy battle dressings, some walking, some lying in heaps in the back of ambulances; trucks, buses, herds of water buffalo, and oxcarts creaking on wooden wheels. They were packed densely and stretched own to roads, solid, moving masses that rolled over barricades and flowed pas the hulks of burned-out tanks, past the corpses and pieces of corpses rotting in the fields at the roadsides. And from behind those retreating columns came the sound of bombs and shellfire, the guttural rumbling of the beast, war, devouring its victims."

"Looking back now on the Vietnam war, I feel nothing but sorrow for my own naiveté in believing that the Communists were revolutionaries worthy of my support. In fact, they betrayed the Vietnamese People and deceived progressives throughout the world. The responsibility for the tragedies that have engulfed my compatriots is mine. And now I can only bear witness to this truth so that all former supporters of the Vietcong may share their responsibility with me."

Doan Van Toai

A Lament for Vietnam

(NYT mag, Mar 29,1981)

"In the early years of the American involvement, the administration misled Washington correspondents to such an extent that many an editor, unable to reconcile what his man in Saigon was reporting with what his man in Washington told him, preferred to use the official version. John Shaw, a Time correspondent in Vietnam….says, "for years the press corps in Vietnam was undermined by the White House and the Pentagon…yet the Pentagon Papers proved to the hilt that what the correspondents in Saigon had been sending was true."

Phillip Knightley

The First Casualty

"The failure of Western intellectuals to expose the atrocities in Vietnam, although they have known of them, is comparable to the silence of Communists during the time of Stalin about which Western liberals prate so much."

-Bertrand Russell

Nixon: "I want to use the nuclear bomb!"

Kissinger: "That would be too much!"

Nixon: "A nuclear bomb-would that bother you? For Chrisakes! Can't you think big?"

(from the Nixon White House tapes)

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped 7 1/2 million tons of bombs (including napalm) and 86 million liters of herbicide and defoliant on Vietnam, adding up to three times the tonnage dropped during World War II, In Laos, a small country of 4 million inhabitants, it used 3 million tons of bombs. The colonial war waged by the United States inflicted between 1.0 and 1.7 million civilian casualties on the Vietnamese population

"By their own lights and measurements, Americans won the war. Certainly they met their quotas of munitions exploded and ears collected. If, in the end, the world of even stubbornly refused to conform to the world seen in their somnambulist’s dream, it was, as usual, not their fault. Even after taking casualties of 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded after laying waste three countries and killing probably as many as 2 million Laotians, Cambodians and Vietnamese, the American techno-bureaucracy insisted on the perfection of its technique and the innocence of its motive.

Retreating under cover of euphemism, all the best authorities agreed that the war had been a well-intentioned mistake-"a quagmire," "a morass" , an accumulation of small but unavoidable errors of judgment, "a swamp," a nightmare." It fell to the lot of Arthur M. Schlesinger to pronounce the pious benediction. "The story of Vietnam," he said, "is a tragedy without villains."

                 Lewis Lapham

   By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II-almost one 500-pound for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were 20 million bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth-an area the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poison. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale biologists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T)on mice, reported defective mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was different.

                    Howard Zinn

                       A Peoples History of the United States

   "Pentagon officials in Washington and navy spokesmen in San Diego announced, after the United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam in 1973, that the navy was going to purge itself of "undesirables"-and that these included as many as six thousand men in the Pacific fleet. "a substantial proportion of them black." All together, about 700,000 GIs had received less than honorable discharges. In the year 1973, one of every five discharges was "less than honorable" indicating something less than dutiful obedience in the military. By 1971, 177 of every 1,000 American soldiers were listed as "absent without leave." some of them three or four times. Deserters doubled from 47,000 in 1967 to 89,000 in 1971."

                    ibid

   "Traditional history portrays the end of wars as coming from the initiatives of leaders-negotiations in Paris or Brussels or Geneva or Versailles-just as it often finds the coming of war a response to the demand of "the people." The Vietnam war gave clear evidence that at least for that war (making one wonder about the others) the political leaders were the last to take steps to end the war-"the people" were far ahead. The President was always far behind. The Supreme Court silently turned away from cases challenging the Constitutionality of the war. Congress was years behind public opinion."

                        ibid

"The generation gap is now a moral chasm, across which the young stare at their elders with distrust, convinced that the values that make for success are fakes. Evidently the first field in which young people are struck by this suspicion is public life, and there the undeclared war in Vietnam has had a disastrous impact. Who indeed could have believed that, twenty-five years after Pearl Harbor, national policy would be carried on like this?

   Young people....were shocked to find that they could not be proud of the policy of America and her allies in Asia. This was coupled with a second shock, when they found they could not be proud of the weapons and methods with which the war was waged. But the greatest shock of all to the idealism of the young is the way in which official spokesmen manipulate and even hoodwink the public opinion that they are supposed to lead. A whole apparatus of evasion has been developed in which nothing is an outright lie, and yet nothing quite means what it seems to say. The very words are unreal: de-escalation, ultimate deterrent, agonizing reappraisal-a  tasteless vocabulary of plastic which George Orwell prophetically called Newspeak."

-J. Bronowski

"We're on our way up....the pendulum is beginning to swing."

General Westmoreland    Washington Star, April 16,1972

"A year ago none of us could see victory. There wasn't a prayer. Now we can see it clearly-like light at the end of a tunnel."

-Lieutenant General Henri-Eugene Navarre (Commander-in-Chief of the French Union Forces in Indo-China) Time Sept 29, 1953

"At last there is light at the end of the tunnel."

-Joseph Alsop   September 13,1965

"I believe there is a light at the end of what has been a long and lonely tunnel."

-Lyndon B. Johnson Sept 21,1966

"Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain....I see light at the end of the tunnel."

-Walt Whitman Rostow   Dec 12,1967

"Come see the light at the end of the tunnel."

-Official invitation to New Year's Eve party at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Dec 1967

"A very special challenge was that of Vietnam. We have met that challenge successfully......Militarily and politically, Hanoi is losing."

-Richard M. Nixon U.S. News & World Report, June 26,1972

"Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging antiwar controversy...I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium, American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war."

                               Richard M. Nixon

                                 Memoirs

"If the United States gives up (in Vietnam)....the Pacific Ocean will become a Red Sea."

-Richard M. Nixon   Chicago Daily News,Oct15,1965

   "Polgar burned all the CIA's files, cables, and codebooks that evening. Not long after midnight, he composed his farewell: "THIS WILL BE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION....IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST....THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED OUR LESSON. SAIGON SIGNING OFF."

    then he blew up the machine that sent the message.

-Tim Weiner

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the the CIA

"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experience that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay."

-John McCain   (foreword to "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstam

*******************************

Book: "The war Managers" ,by Douglas Kinnard

Book: "Dereliction of Duty" by H.R. McMaster

Book: "The Decision Against War: Eisenhower and Bien Phu,1954" by Melanie Billings-Yun

"Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, Ed by Spencer C. Tucker et al.

"A Grand Delusion" by Robert Mann

Book: "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam" by Neil Sheehan

Book: "We Were Soldiers Once....and Young: Ia Drang Valley-The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam" by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (REt)

Book: "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts" by David H. Hackworth & E. England

Book: "The First Battle: Operation Starlite and the Beginning of the Blood Debt in Vietnam" by Otto J. Hehrack

Book: "Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns" by David Lamb

Book: "Vietnam: A Complete Chronicle of the War"  text by Michael MacLear

Book: "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg

Book: "Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam" by K. Conboy & D. Andrade

Book: "Memphis, Nam, Sweden: The Story of a Black Deserter" by Terry Whitmore

Book: "Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War" by J.F. Dunnigan & AA Nofi

Book: "Long Binh Jail: An Oral History of Vietnam's Notorious U.S. Military Prison" by Cecil Barr Currey

Book: "The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War" by John Prados

Book: "At Hell's Gate: A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace" by Claude Anshin Thomas

Book: "The Co-Vans: U.S. Marine Advisors in Vietnam" by John Grider Miller

Book: "Counterpart: A South Vietnamese Naval Officer's War" by K. Do & J. Kane

Book: "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg

Book: "VIETNAM AIR WARFARE" The Story of the Aircraft, the Battles, and the Pilots Who Fought" Ed. by R.F. Dorr & C. Bishop

Book: VIETNAM WAR DIARY: The Month-by Month Experiences of the U.S. Forces ,1964-1975

Book: "Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia" by Arnold R. Isaacs

Book: "No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam" by Larry Berman

Book: "An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia" by B. Hendon & E,.A. Stewart

Book: "Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns" by David Lamb

Book: "Hard Men Humble: Vietnam Veterans Who Wouldn't Come Home" by Jonathan Stevenson

Book: "Vietnam: A Complete Photographic History" by Michael maclear

Book: "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg

Book: "The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War" by Ralph Wetterhahn

Book: Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All sides" by Christian G. Appy

Book: "An Enormous Crime: The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia" by B. Hendon & E.A. Stewart