Jim McDermott Quotes

Yes, there is a story about Agent Orange, and we knew that it harmed our troops and we knew how long it was to get the medical community to accept that, the military to accept it, the VA to accept it.

The danger of dioxins in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies is difficult to illustrate, since they are not visible to the naked eye. My time in Vietnam allowed me to see the result of large quantities of them and therefore understand better the insidiousness of the smaller quantities that have found their way into our lives and bodies.

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years.

It won't hurt you. It's just to kill plants. It's called Agent Orange...and it won't bother humans.

I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

My mum knows people in the village who died or were affected by Agent Orange who had kids who are disabled. I could have been an orphan. So many things could have gone wrong but here I am... I realise how lucky I am to be here.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.

I'm from the Vietnam generation. I didn't serve.

My father had gone to Vietnam.

Under this scientific and moral pressure, the Canadian government conceded publicly that the use of these weapons in Vietnam was, in their view, a contravention of the Geneva Protocol.

The reason I'm not more political is because I have music. And from a young age, I needed it. After prison, my father came to America, joined the Army, fought in Vietnam - and was exposed to Agent Orange. He died a slow, horrible death. Music was my escape.

The U.S. dropped more high explosives on Vietnam than the Allies used on Germany and Japan together in the Second World War.

I'd like people to listen to our soldiers. They were there. They heard the alarms go off. They tasted the substance in the air. They spit up blood. They had rashes on their bodies. They got sick.

It's horrible to think that a small cadre of people would manipulate that information. I mean, for God's sake, we've admitted that we were experimenting on our veterans with mustard gas. So there is no security question. It can't possibly be the reason.

I was in Vietnam, and I was exposed to Agent Orange. And there's a high relationship between people that were exposed to Agent Orange and the kind of lymphoma that I had. The prostate cancer was genetic in my family. My father had prostate cancer, my - three of my four uncles had prostate cancer.

We have as a nation been duped by those who use our guilt about how we treated the innocent pawns in the Vietnam War game - the soldiers - into missing the point once again about the utter senselessness that is war.

Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there.

Vietnam in America was truly a second Civil War.

I can stand by no longer and see these disgusting performances by the Navy and War Departments at the expense of the lives of our people, and the delusion of the American public.

The emotions suppressed during the long, tense period of global warfare were released by peace, and erupted into a tornado-like explosion of violent feelings, abusive criticism of the military, and aggressive pressures on Congress for fundamental reforms in the court-martial system.

Our Pentagon has a reputation for not telling the truth.

When [George W.] Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.

We we’re wrong, terribly wrong [about the Vietnam war.]

One should refer to things by their accurate designation. What is happening right now in Vietnam is a form of torture. That is why the bombings are an infamy. Of such there are many in modern history. They are often linked by name: Guernica, Oradour, Babij Jar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville and Treblinka. Now there is another name to add to the row: Hanoi, the Christmas of 1972.