In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it’s that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We are probably much more angry than that and I don’t want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I’m outclassed here. I know that all of you have talked about every possible -- every possible alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you’ve considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I’m not going to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling which many of the men who’ve returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found that most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace; and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it’s that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. We are probably much more angry than that and I don’t want to go into the foreign policy aspects because I’m outclassed here. I know that all of you have talked about every possible -- every possible alternative to getting out of Vietnam. We understand that. We know that you’ve considered the seriousness of the aspects to the utmost level and I’m not going to try and deal on that. But I want to relate to you the feeling which many of the men who’ve returned to this country express because we are probably angriest about all that we were told about Vietnam and about the mystical war against communism. We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese, whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image, were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found that most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace; and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American." in the context of "John Kerry, Statement Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered 22 April 1971, Washington, D.C." to mean that wisdom is timeless.