Quote

I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.

The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom and peace. But in the face of United States aggression they have risen up, united as one man.

You remember all those phrases about how 'these people' - Asians - don't value human life like we do. Well if you spend any time around them, you discover that they love their children just as much as we love ours. That is certainly true of the Vietnamese.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

Vietnamese must be made to feel that they are racial inferiors with no right to national identity.

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.

We've committed many war crimes in Vietnam - but I'll tell you something interesting about that. We were committing war crimes in World War II, before the Nuremberg trials were held and the principle of war crimes was stated.

The trial organized with U.N. participation of some kind will be for crimes committed by Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975 to 1979. That's it.

Back then when Chomsky and Herman wrote, the left, myself among them, all knew that something terrible was happening in Vietnam, though most now claim to remember otherwise.

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood.