WHEN YOU LOOK at the question of the sacrifice made by Vietnam in the war, you must also consider the history of our country. When we gained our independence in 1945 we already had four thousand years of history. For one thousand years, we were under the feudalist control of the North [of China]. We had to fight in order to regain our independence. And three thousand years later we had to fight to regain our independence again. Then after independence — after the August Revolution [of 1945, against Japanese occupation] — we had to fight the French for nine years in order to protect our independence. Only then came the fight against the U.S.
— Dao Huy Ngoc to Robert McNamara
transcribed from a discussion in Hanoi, June 1997
The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
by James G. Blight and janet M. Lang, Companion book to the documentary film, p. 54
© 2005 by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
THE UNITED STATES came to Vietnam at a critical juncture of Vietnamese history — a period of history more profound than any the Vietnamese had ever experienced. In 1954 the Vietnamese were gaining their independence after seventy years of French colonial rule. They were engaged in a struggle to create a nation and to adapt a largely traditional society to the modern world. By backing one contender — by actually creating that contender — the United States was not just fighting a border war or intervening, as Imperial China so often did, in a struggle between two similar contenders, two dynasties. It was entering into a moral and ideological struggle over the form of the state and the goals of the society.
— Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
© 1972 by Frances Fitzgerald
Little, Brown and Company in Association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 6
Pulitzer Prize winner for General Nonfiction, 1973
IN THE CASE OF Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was a total misunderstanding as a result. They believed we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war.
— Robert S. McNamara [U.S. Secretary of Defense 1961-68 under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson]
transcribed from the film The Fog Of War
Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Feature), 2003
Errol Morris, Director
NEVER HAVING KNOWN a serious ideological struggle in their history, many Americans persisted in thinking of the Vietnamese conflict as a civil war, as a battle between two fixed groups of people with different but conceivably negotiable interests. But the regional conflict existed only within the context of a larger struggle... [one] even more all-encompassing than the European revolutionary wars.
...To the Vietnamese of the twentieth century "peace" meant not a compromise between various interest groups and organizations, but the restoration of a single, uniform way of life.
— Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
© 1972 by Frances Fitzgerald
Little, Brown and Company in Association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 15
AND AS FOR ACTUAL warfare, we have seen in Vietnam how an enormous superiority in the means of violence can become helpless if confronted with an ill-equipped but well organized opponent who is much more powerful. The lesson, to be sure, was there to be learned from the history of guerrilla warfare, which is at least as old as the defeat in Spain of Napoleon's still-unvanquished army.
—On Violence
© 1969, 1970 by Hannah Arendt
Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York
Excerpt from the paperback Harvest edition, p. 51
IN 1963 THE BUDDHISTS HAD protested against a small-time tyrant, but in 1966 they had protested this anarchy, this Shanghai-ism emanating from Saigon. The most sophisticated of them saw the irony of it: Americans who despised the corruption had collectively visited it upon the Vietnamese. From the bar girls with their PX transistors to General Ky with his helicopter and his silver jet, the Saigonese were engaged in little more than a scramble for their own selfish interests. And the Americans could do nothing to stop it, for by their very presence they made the city people into prostitutes, parasites. Saigon was the first to go, for, so recently a dependency of the French, it was not strong enough to stand up to the Americans. Nor had it really wished to. As the perpetual middlemen, the servants and translators for the foreigners, the Saigonese wished for a new master to replace the French and to defend them against their own countryside. Now once again feeding in safety on the foreigners, they gave up their own independence of spirit, their own will to reform themselves.
— Fire In The Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
© 1972 by Frances Fitzgerald
Little, Brown and Company in Association with The Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 319