Anytime it was advertised that I was going to be at a particular place, the radicals would be there, the cameras with TV news.
As the senior commander in Vietnam, I was aware of the potency of public opinion – and I worried about it.
I do not believe that the men who served in uniform in Vietnam have been given the credit they deserve. It was a difficult war against an unorthodox enemy.
I don’t take criticism lying down.
I don’t think I have been loved by my troops, but I think I have been respected.
I’ve made this statement many times: If I would have to do it over again, I would have made known the forthcoming Tet Offensive.
In the end, we lost IndoChina to the communists. But we did not lose Southeast Asia.
Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there.
President Johnson did not want the Vietnam War to broaden. He wanted the North Vietnamese to leave their brothers in the South alone.
The last man in the world who should have been criticized was the American soldier. They should have criticized me.
The military don’t start wars. Politicians start wars.
The Vietnam memorial is a masterpiece. The names of the dead are listed there, chronologically. Just the names.
This was a type of war that we’d had no experience with before. Some of our policies were kind of trial and error in character.
Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
War is fear cloaked in courage.
When the soldiers came home from Vietnam, there were no parades, no celebrations. So they built the Vietnam Memorial for themselves.
