Vietnam Vets Quotes

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them.

It was difficult to find information because Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was called shell shock during W.W.II, and when Vietnam Vets were found to suffer from the same symptoms after exposure to traumatic war scenes, a study was embarked upon that ended with the new, more appropriate name in 1980. Thomas was diagnosed with P.T.S.D. shortly afterwards, before the term P.T.S.D. was common.

This country has not seen and probably will never know the true level of sacrifice of our veterans. As a civilian I owe an unpayable debt to all our military. Going forward let’s not send our servicemen and women off to war or conflict zones unless it is overwhelmingly justifiable and on moral high ground. The men of WWII were the greatest generation, perhaps Korea the forgotten, Vietnam the trampled, Cold War unsung and Iraqi Freedom and Afghanistan vets underestimated. Every generation has proved itself to be worthy to stand up to the precedent of the greatest generation. Going back to the Revolution American soldiers have been the best in the world. Let’s all take a remembrance for all veterans who served or are serving, peace time or wartime and gone or still with us. 11/11/16 May God Bless America and All Veterans.

If my name were Nubby Blues, I wouldn't be a jazz musician, I'd be a disabled Vietnam vet on welfare.

As the joke goes, ‘How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.’6

Even worse than that, in the late seventies she’d sat here in her living room and watched a fellow Vietnam vet claim on television that Agent Orange had given him—and thousands like him—cancer. I died in Vietnam; I just didn’t know it, he’d said. Not long after that, the world had learned that the herbicide also caused miscarriages and birth defects. Most likely it had caused Frankie’s miscarriage.

Treatment of returning soldiers throughout history. Did you know one-third of the Union dead in the Civil War were buried before the bodies had been identified? Or that black soldiers in the south, coming home from World War I, were beaten for wearing uniforms in public? And now there are tens of thousands of guys like me just waiting, you know, standing in line for help? We trusted our country, we fought for it, and now it is blowing us off. It happens in every war, is the point. Soldiers are mistreated when they come home. Joel said everyone complains about people spitting on Vietnam vets, but who knows? Maybe that was more honest.

She's heard stories of Vietnam vets who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs. She's wondering how many women are walking around this world feeling the tingling of their amputated wings, remembering what it was to fly, to sing.

She's heard stories of Vietnam vets who can still feel the tingling of their amputated limbs. She's wondering how many women are walking around this world feeling the tingling of their amputated wings, remembering what it was like to fly, to sing.

I have to keep my mouth shut about Nam though. All of these guys want to believe they were fighting an honorable war, and that their conduct deserves respect. They want the public to treat them like they’re heroes—like the WWII vets were.” “Instead, smart ass, pampered kids call them names and throw dog shit at them.

I hold the door to the post office open for a weathered man in a wheelchair. He is gracious, thanking me. One leg is missing, and just as I notice this, I see the sticker on the back of his chair: VIETNAM VETS. My thoughts jumble as an ache brews in my heart. I think of war and how it destroys, divides, and damages. I see the faces of those in the refugee camp and those who found their names on The List and are now in America. I want to tell this wounded soldier that I am sorry for his loss and for the abandonment he may have felt upon his return. I want to say other things, but right now I'm just honored to hold the door for him.

What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.

And this is as good a picture as any of how counterculture communities like the Haight took care of the war’s mangled souls: a doctor from a hippie clinic carrying a dying, emaciated soldier in his arms. For decades after the war, up to this very day, right-wing politicians and pundits have spread the libel about how peace activists and hippies greeted returning Vietnam vets with gobs of spit and contempt.

When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc—the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels—in fact, he knows—that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

If ever there was a prime-time trigger for PTSD you couldn't do much better than this, but lucky for Norm, the crowd, America, the forty-million-plus TV viewing audience, Bravos can deal, oh yes! Pupils dilated, pulse and blood pressure through the roof, limbs trembling with stress-reflex cortisol rush, but it's cool, it's good, their shit's down tight, no Vietnam-vet crackups for Bravo squad! You can march these boys straight into sound-and-light show hell and Bravos can deal, but damn, isn't it rude to put them through it.

It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imaging gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and HOT WET SLUTS are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief.

Wait a second,” Andy said, snapping his fingers. “You're Vietnamese.” “Don't say it,” Sun warned. But Andy, a grin stretched across his face, couldn't resist. “You're a Vietnam vet.” Sun’s face became even harder, something Andy hadn't thought possible. “Never heard that one before. Open the pen there.” Andy lifted the latch on the gate and Sun led the sheep out of the pen and over to the entrance door. “I've visited Viet Nam twice,” Andy said. “Beautiful place. All of those war movies make it look like hell, but it's actually very tranquil, don't you think?” “I wouldn't know. I've never been there. I’m an American.

While the party of Obama has little in common with that of JFK, for a better comparison, try exploring the Communist Party USA’s website (CPUSA.org), and you’ll be stunned at the resemblance between it and today’s Democratic Party. You might also take a moment to thoughtfully reflect on the Democrats’ candidates who in recent decades were either elected, or nearly elected, as president: Bill Clinton, a serial sexual predator; Al Gore, by many accounts a raving lunatic; John Kerry, who betrayed his fellow Vietnam vets and his country;10 Barack Obama, a deceitful, America-hating, Far-Left radical; and Hillary Clinton, accurately described by Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient William Safire as “a congenital liar.”11 Whatever

Or is it the opposite-that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we've reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief. Assume for a moment that it's not silly to see things this man's way. What cogent, compelling, relevant message can the center and left offer him? Can we bear to admit that we've actually helped set him up to hear "We 're better than they are" not as twisted and scary but as refreshing and redemptive and true? If so, then now what?

Dr. van der Kolk asked the man directly: “What happened to you on July 5 at 6:30 in the morning?” He responded immediately. While he was in Vietnam, the man’s platoon had been ambushed by the Viet Cong. Everyone had been killed except for himself and his friend, Jim. The date was July 4. Darkness fell and the helicopters were unable to evacuate them. They spent a terrifying night together huddled in a rice paddy surrounded by the Viet Cong. At about 3:30 in the morning, Jim was hit in the chest by a Viet Cong bullet. He died in his friend’s arms at 6:30 on the morning of July 5. After returning to the States, every July 5 (that he did not spend in jail), the man had re-enacted the anniversary of his friend’s death. In the therapy session with Dr. van der Kolk, the vet experienced grief over the loss ...

I became a very timid individual. I became introspective. I wondered what had made me act the way I had acted. Why had I killed my fellow men in war, without any feeling, remorse, or regret? And when the war was over, why did I con­tinue to drink and swagger around and get into fistfights? Why did I like to dish out pain, and why did I take positive delight in the suffering of others? Was I insane? Was it too much testosterone? Women don’t do things like that. The rapacious Will to Power lost its hold on me. Suddenly I began to feel sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures. You lose your health and you start thinking this way. Has man become any better since the times of Theog­enes? The world is replete with badness. I’m not talking about that old routine where you drag out the Spanish Inqui­sition, the Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, etc. It happens in our own backyard. Twentieth-century America is one of the most materially prosperous nations in history. But take a walk through an American prison, a nursing home, the slums where the homeless live in cardboard boxes, a cancer ward. Go to a Vietnam vets’ meeting, or an A.A. meeting, or an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. How hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses. Is the world not rather like a hell, as Schopenhauer, that clearheaded seer—who has helped me transform my suf­fering into an object of understanding—was so quick to point out? They called him a pessimist and dismissed him with a word, but it is peace and self-renewal that I have found in his pages.

My mother’s brother Johnny was a Vietnam vet, and he too had been wounded. He had spent a long time in a hospital and he understood more than most what I was going through. Or at least he thought he did, and I appreciated that--even if I didn’t act like it at first. Uncle Johnny started to visit every weekend. He’d come and sit with me to give my parents a little breather. After my dad won the battle over my medication, I was, as I said, a little more lucid. I was also a little more ornery. I wouldn’t let anyone turn on that little red radio. I didn’t even care if Sheryl Crow was telling me what was good. I was more aware of my pain. Just lying there and listening or doing anything at all hurt. My whole body hurt and everyone and everything was to blame. All I wanted to do was sit in silence with the door shut. Uncle Johnny obliged me for a while. He’d come in and sit down in the chair next to my bed. He sat and stared blankly right along with me. But after a while, he couldn’t handle that anymore. One day, on the verge of dying of boredom, Uncle Johnny had had enough. He turned to me and said sternly, “Noah, I’m not gonna sit in here like we’re in an oversized coffin. We’re either opening the door or we’re turning the TV on. Which one do you want?” I rolled my eyes and grumbled for a few minutes before answering, “All right. Turn on the TV.” Without hesitation Uncle Johnny shot up out of that chair and reached up to hit the power button on the TV mounted from the ceiling. No sooner had his butt hit the chair seat than he was right back up again. “Fuck that. I am opening the door, too, because I want it open.” He vigorously emphasized his intention so I didn’t protest. He marched over and swung that door open. I swear he might have even taken a deep breath as if it were fresh mountain air. Then he came back to his chair and sat down.

He then made the connection between Jim’s death and the compulsion he felt to commit the robberies. Once he became aware of his feelings and the role the original event had played in driving his compulsion, the man was able to stop re-enacting this tragic incident. What was the connection between the robberies and the Vietnam experience? By staging the robberies, the man was re-creating the fire-fight that had resulted in the death of his friend (as well as the rest of his platoon). By provoking the police to join in the re-enactment, the vet had orchestrated the cast of characters needed to play the role of the Viet Cong. He did not want to hurt anyone, so he used his fingers instead of a gun. He then brought the situation to a climax and was able to elicit the help he needed to heal his psychic wounds. That act enabled him to resolve his anguish, grief, and guilt about his buddy’s violent death and the horrors of war.

He studied me. “You were in Nam?” I nodded. “Yep.” He turned to Lolo. “Hey, Chief, how many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” She stared at him. “I don’t know.” He pointed his cigar at her in an agitated fashion. “That’s right, because you weren’t there, man!” We

That night, they sat around the hotel room with a bottle of tequila and some salt and limes and talked about names for the new real estate company. A few ideas sprang up right away but got rejected just as fast. A half bottle of tequila later, the name "Real Estate Maximums Incorporated" was tossed around as a possibility. Nobody spoke for a moment because everyone liked it. Maximums meant that everyone would get the most out of the relationship-real estate agents and customers alike. The name did a good job of communicating the everybody wins principle at the heart of the endeavor. But after a few more minutes, they realized it didn't quite work. It wasn't snappy enough for a good brand name, and it was too long to fit on a real estate sign. More tequila got poured. No one could come up with another name that felt as on-target as Real Estate Maximums. Someone suggested shortening it to R. E. Max. That made it snappier and appealing in a brand name sense; but when you wrote it out, it looked too much like a real person's name. You could imagine junk mail arriving at the office in care of Mr. and Mrs. R. E. Max. Collins pointed out that Exxon had formed only a few years before, and the X with a slash through it looked very smart. So Liniger took out the dots and tried a slash through the middle of the word and then capitalized all the letters. They looked at the pad of paper and saw: RE/MAX. A silence came over them, followed by a few backslaps and cheers. Everything about the word looked exactly right, as though they were talking about an established global company. Now, what about colors? They were on a roll. Now was no time to stop. A few more shots of tequila went around while they debated the right look for the new RE/MAX. It didn't take long to figure it out: Everyone in the room was a Vietnam vet and patriotic to the core. The colors, of course, had to be red, white, and blue. When they considered the whole package, they knew they had it. And that's how the idea for the distinctive RE/MAX brand was hatched. Considering the time and resources that get poured into brand development today, their methods might seem unorthodox if admirably effective. No money was spent on advertising agencies, market research, or trademark protection. The only investment was a decent bottle of tequila; the only focus group, a bunch of guys sitting around a room having a good laugh.

I was one of the privileged majority who would be leading troops in combat in just a month, and I felt a keen sense of irony when the lance corporal/clerk who processed my orders turned out to be one of the officer candidates who had flunked out of my OCS class. His reward for failure would be a safe stateside tour of duty behind a typewriter, and although I would not have traded places with him for anything, he was living proof of the Marine Corps axiom that the shitbirds get the easy assignments.

There's an old joke, "How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" "You wouldn't know, you weren't there.

Facing It" My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

All who hear should understand that no person’s suffering can be measured against another person’s suffering. It can be extremely damaging if anyone makes comparisons. Combat veterans frequently doubt that they are worthy of treatment, knowing other vets who are worse off now or went through worse than they did. Many survivors of trauma obstruct their own healing by placing themselves in “hierarchies of suffering”, usually to their own disadvantage.

with every vet Jed knew. He’d taken a bullet through the left eye, which was bad enough, but then the round’s diagonal trajectory had cored down and out the back of his head. In an instant, his left eye was jelly and his right occipital lobe went from functional to oatmeal. Technically, his right eye still worked, but the brain damage meant that, after ’Nam, he couldn’t read or recognize words. Color was gone, too. His waking world had existed in ashy shades of gray, although his dreams and the flashbacks were always in Technicolor. Worse, his brain had conjured eerie shimmers the Navy shrinks said were hallucinations, like visual phantom limbs. Like Grace, though … these days, he was different. Now he stood, looking up at that distant cabin. Oh, he was still blind in that left eye, the eyeball itself long gone and the socket filled with a plastic implant sheathed with flesh. He never had gotten around to getting fitted for an artificial eye, maybe because he didn’t mind making other people uncomfortable. Vietnam was wedged in his brain, good and tight, like a stringy piece of meat caught between his teeth that wouldn’t be dislodged for love or money. So why should everybody else forget if he couldn’t? But his good right eye still worked, nowadays better than ever, and that was what he aimed at the

Vietnam-vet unemployment is a third higher than the national average, they don't get anything close to the benefits the guys from World War Two received, and those who return to college are heckled and spit on by students and teachers as well.

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

You know, I wasn’t afraid to go to war, and I should have been. I am afraid to go to the memorial, and I shouldn’t be. People made us think we’d done something wrong, shameful, didn’t they? We were forgotten; all of us Vietnam vets, but the women most of all.” The women nodded.

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....

They somehow figured out a way to make our parents cheer on our destruction instead of our success. We became the suspects, the terrorists living under their new roof, a marauding gang of anti-fascists ready to sell our souls for a couple of social media likes. Yes, Mom, we did it all for the lolz. What a laugh riot it has been to live under the highest inflation and lowest economy so we could pay into safety nets that would be consumed before we ever had a chance. We were all giving our lives in some way, over griddles with burger patties, in hallways of our schools to preserve the Second Amendment, or in deserts for you to fill up your SUV. Hell, there wasn’t a single one of us that didn’t know someone who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. They would return through that same revolving door. I sometimes wondered when they would replace the Vietnam vets on the street corners, panhandling on the Panhandle. “Never forget!” Oh, how we would forget their faces soon enough. They would be hidden under scruffy beards and ignored by the VA. Living in a military town, we knew all too well the song and dance. Just another cog in the machine of how our generation was being forgotten before it ever got a chance to begin.

One man had terminal cancer but said he really wanted to die now for financial reasons. He was a Vietnam War vet, he said, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the Agent Orange attacks against Vietnamese farmers. He wanted all his savings to go to Vietnamese victims—not to pay his way through some shitty American nursing home.

Oh, no,” he said. “It happened all right. It’s just not what they’re saying it is.” He looked around and then took a step closer, standing so that his face was inches from hers. “If you ask me, it’s a government conspiracy.” He was American, a Vietnam vet. He had been awarded a Purple Heart, which he handed back to the U.S. immigration authority at the border when he crossed into Canada. His spinal injuries had never healed and he required a steady dose of morphine in order to control the pain. Ruth didn’t have the energy to argue. She offered tea and then sat with him, listening to his theories and thinking about the box in the basement. How nice it would be to crawl inside and fall asleep.

So I see a fair bit of resentment. You old Vietnam vet, I see their eyes saying, you old hippie, you got lucky and were born in the right little window and got to grab all the surplus of happiness that history ever produced, and you blew it, you stood around and did nothing while the right reaganed back into power and shut down all possibility of change for an entire generation, you blew it in a ten-year party and staggered off stoned and complicit. You neither learned to do machine politics nor dismantled the machine. Not one of you imagined what had to be done. And so the backlash came down, the reactionary power structure, stronger than ever. And now we’re the ones who have to pay the price for that. You can see why there might be a little resentment. Okay—say we did. Well, no wonder. We didn’t know what we were doing, we didn’t have the slightest idea. There was no model to follow, we were out in the vacuum of a new reality, blowing it and then crashing back to Earth—it was a crazy time. It went by too fast. We didn’t really get it until later, what we needed to do. Where the power was, and how we could use it, and why it was important to spread it around better. So. No more blaming the past. Be here now. Now we know better, so let’s see if we can do better. After all, if we boomers try to get it right now, it could be better than ever. We could make it right for the grandkids and get a late redemption call.

At Ft. Lewis, the Vietnam vets were treated worse than prisoners of war rather than the decorated war heroes many of them were.

This was not an ordinary AA group. The failed, the aberrant, the doubly addicted, and the totally brain-fried whose neurosis didn't even have a name found their way to the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker meeting: strippers from the Quarter, psychotic street people, twenty-dollar hookers, peckerwood fundamentalists, leather-clad, born-again bikers, women who breast-fed their infants in a sea of cigarette smoke, a couple of cops who had done federal time, male prostitutes dying of AIDS, parolees with a lean, hungry look who sought only a signature on an attendance slip for their P.O.'s, methheads who drank from fire extinguishers in the joint, and Vietnam vets who wore their military tattoos and black- or olive-colored 1st Cav. and airborne T-shirts and still heard the thropping of helicopter blades in their sleep.

The Vietnam vets? They got screwed, too. So did the ones who fought in Desert Storm. And now it’s happening all over again for the soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. When is this going to stop? When are they going to fulfill their promises?