Evans Carlson Quotes

I didn’t lose the war, nor did the men who fought it. The high command lost the war. And after the war was over, they didn’t stand up for us. Veterans had to build their own memorial—with their own initiative, time, and money. Congress had to pass a bill so we could have this memorial; all they had to do was lift a pen to their fingers. But almost three million men and women who served in Vietnam lifted things far heavier—and carried those things every day, long after the war was over.

Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the War. It is true that to do it meant looking back into a past of which many of us, preferring to contemplate tomorrow rather than yesterday, believe ourselves to be tired. But it is only in the light of the past that we, the depleted generation now coming into the control of public affairs, the generation which has to make the present and endeavor to mould the future, can understand ourselves or hope to be understood by our successors. —Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

Keep your eyes open to see the beauty all around you,” he once closed a letter to me. “Take time to count your blessings. The light can soften some of the shadows of the past.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Collin Powell, a Vietnam Vet, then offered one of the most beautiful tributes I've ever heard. "You went, you served, you suffered. The names of eight of your sisters are etched on the wall for having made the supreme sacrifice and yet your service and your sacrifice have been mostly invisible for all these intervening years. When you finished what you had to do, you came quietly home, you stepped back into the background from which you had modestly come. You melted back into a society which for too long now had ignored the vital and endless work that falls to women and is not appreciated as it should be....