Jack H. Jacobs Quotes

I remember George Aiken, this senator from Vermont, got up in the Senate- and this was long before we made that huge commitment of forces in Vietnam, still relatively early in the conflict- and Aiken was a Republican who was pretty much to the right, he said, 'I've got a great idea: Why don't we just say we won, and go home?'
And of course, ten years later, that's exactly what we did. Fifty-eight thousand lives later. And now we know from the tapes that came out from Johnson, he said, 'This sucks. This is a big mistake. I'm going to live to regret this. I know we're doing the wrong thing, but what can you do?' He was very badly advised. He had rotten advice from his civilian assistants, and even worse advice from the military. McNamara was probably the wrong guy in that job, and Westmoreland was a complete numbskull. I mean, he's a great guy and I'm sure he's a patriot, but one should never confuse respect for people's motives with respect for their intellectual acuity, and he had lots of the former and none of the latter, none whatsoever. He was absolutely the wrong guy for the job.
And it may very well be that you couldn't have picked the right guy for that job. There may not have been a right guy for that job.

If you have to defend liberty, you've got to defend liberty. It's as simple as that. But I found the actual combat a horrible, horrible thing, to be acutely avoided. Whatever you can do, it's best to avoid it... I was scared all the time I was in Vietnam. I didn't enjoy it for a second.

Sure the Vietnamese were reluctant, they didn't want to fight. They were true believers, but they were reluctant participants. The kids were all conscripts, and they were going to get their brains blown out. They weren't interested in fighting. And this is to say nothing of all the strategic errors we had made when Ho Chi Minh asked for help. I mean we advised them during World War II and they asked us to help them throw the French out and, because we were afraid of pissing off de Gaulle- who, by the way, needed a great deal of pissing off, if you want my opinion- we decided we weren't going to do anything about it. We would have solved a lot of problems if we'd just told de Gaulle to get the hell out, if we'd helped Ho Chi Minh and got rid of those guys and been done with it.
But we couldn't distinguish between Ho being a Nationalist on the one hand and his being a communist on the other, any more than today we can distinguish between Osama bin Laden's beig a Muslim on the one hand, which by the way is completely trivial, and a revolutionary on the other, which is really what he is. Ho Chi Minh really was a Nationalist, a revolutionary. So they say Osama bin Laden is a fascist.