Now I’ve seen for myself what war is really about. It’s about how a farm boy from Iowa hangs onto a machine gun for 8 hours so he can protect his injured buddies, even when he himself is wounded and bleeding. Or how an African-American boy from Charlotte and a white boy from Huston decide they’d rather die together than abandon the other in the mist battle.

War is about men who love their country, but even more than that love one another.

— War correspondent Joe Galloway

November 09, 2011, 7:11pm / 174

Why must we take this painful road? Why must this nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away?

We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure.

This kind of world will never be built by bombs or bullets. Yet the infirmities of man are such that force must often precede reason, and the waste of war, the works of peace.

We wish that this were not so. But we must deal with the world as it is, if it is ever to be as we wish.

— President Johnson, address at Johns Hopkins University: Peace Without Conquest April 1965

November 09, 2011, 6:07pm / 12

We were children of the 1950s and John Kennedy’s young stalwarts of the early 1960s. He told the world that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship” in the defense of freedom.

We were the down payment on that costly contract, but the man who signed it was not there when we fulfilled his promise. John Kennedy waited for us on a hill in Arlington National Cemetery, and in time we came by the thousands to fill those slopes with out white marble markers and to ask on the murmur of the wind if that was truly the future he had envisioned for us.

— We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, Lt. General Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway

November 08, 2011, 10:02pm / 33