Vietnam quotes

   My mother thinks Vietnam is somewhere near Panama.

-Anonymous
c.1968  The last words of a US soldier fatally woundedduring the Vietnam War, quotedby Australianfilm-maker JohnPilger in his 1978 film Do you remember Vietnam?

   We savaged them, though they had never hurt us, and we cannot find it in our hearts, our honor, to give them helpbecause the government of Vietnam is Communist. And perhaps because they won.

- Martha Ellis Gellhorn
  On the Vietnamese. The Face of War (rev edn),'The War in Vietnam Vietnam  Again,1986'.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

- Michael Herr
  Dispatches,'Colleagues', section 3.

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

- Michael Herr
  In the Observer,15  Jan.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

-John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
  Attributed remark to journalist  James Reston, following Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev,  Jun.

A Gay VietnamVeteranThey gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one.

- Leonard Matlovich
Tombstone inscription. Quoted in the Washington Post, 22  Apr 1988.

Patriotism inVietnamtook the communist road because it was the only one available. It had the appeal of a dream, a dream of social justice.

- Xuan Oanh Nguyen
  In the Eastern Express,17 May.

This is not an invasion of  Vietnam.

- Richard M(ilhous) Nixon
   Television address to the nation announcing the invasion of Cambodia, 30  Apr.

I used to seeVietnam as a war rather than a country.

-John Pilger
  Do you rememberVietnam?

To win inVietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.

- Dr Benjamin McLane Spock
  Dr Spock onVietnam, ch.7.

I went toVietnam to take the train: people have done stranger things in that country.

- Paul Edward Theroux
  The Great Railway Bazaar, ch.24.

The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since theVietnam War.

- Edmund White
  'AfterwordAIDS: An American Epidemic', added to later editions of States of Desire:Travels in Gay America.