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I think that Vietnam, many of us who served in Vietnam thought that was very wasteful, and to what end? To what end? What were we really there for? What were we really fighting for?

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.

Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It's time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

More than half the combat deaths in Vietnam occurred after Richard Nixon was elected on a promise to bring the war to an end, and after the American people had already decided that they did not want one more soldier to die in Vietnam.

Vietnam was really an idealistic thing to stop the spread of communism, which, incidentally, it did. It was a pretty costly way to do it, but it achieved its goal.

You don't attack the grunts of Vietnam; you blame the theory behind the war. Nobody who fought in that war was at fault. It was the war itself that was at fault. It's the same thing with psychotherapy.

The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.

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.