Quote

If the war has faded into history, democracy's defeat in Vietnam has left deep marks in the consciousness of both nations.

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?

To win in Vietnam, we will have to exterminate a nation.

From its inception, South Vietnam was only considered to be an outpost in the war against communism.

By the mid-sixties, the United States had poured more than half a million troops into South Vietnam.

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 didn't lose Vietnam. We quit Vietnam.

South Vietnam had to be built from scratch and, from the very beginning, depended far too much on the Western superpowers. As in the case of a person on public welfare, this dependency, which became greater with each day, was quite difficult to shake.

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.