This Stuff Never Ends
Q: What did you think of the increasing troop presence in Vietnam?
A: Originally we were having a thousand man cut-back. That was John F. Kennedy’s program at the time. A thousand man cutback. I think there was only two thousand people in the whole country at the time. And little by little, they increased it. And then he came out with this thousand-man cutback. That we were going to leave Vietnam. This was in 1963 when he was still alive. The only thing it seemed like of each of those people that were leaving there was another one coming in to replace him. And then Kennedy was assassinated, so that changed things. From that time on it would be Lyndon Johnson’s problem.
Q: Did you support the addition of American troops?
A: Oh yeah, by far. Gerald Ford handled the removal of the Americans bring them home. We are just going to get out of there, and not fool with it anymore. It had been ten years. In Afghanistan we have been there for fourteen years already. This stuff never ends. You end up fighting… If you fight somebody and you kill them, well then he has a brother, a sister, a son, or a daughter, and you make enemies of those people and it just never ends. At some point somebody has got to give up.