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Joey
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Re: The New and Improved Joey? thread
Reply #8003 - Aug 27th, 2012 at 7:31am
" Yet victories would not , as it turned out , be the only hallmarks that would make the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson vivid in history . " We Shall Overcome " were not the only words by which it would be remembered . " Hey ! Hey ! LBJ ! How many kids did you kill today ? " The choruses of the great civil rights hymns were not the only memorable choruses of the Lyndon Johnson years . " Waist deep in the Big Muddy / and the big fool says to push on . " Fifty - eight thousand dead . Three hundred thousand wounded . The amputations , the blindness , the terrible scares of body and mind . Men looking down at the space where their legs used to be . And fifty - eight thousand and three hundred thousand are the numbers of only the American dead and wounded ( not all of them during his Presidency -- the Vietnam War would continue more than four years after he left office -- but virtually all of them after he escalated the war into an American war ) . The number of Vietnamese -- South and North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians -- killed and wounded is not in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands . It may be ( no one has yet made a complete estimate ) more than three million : men and women and children killed and maimed and burned alive , some by bombs dropped on villages selected as targets by Johnson himself , dropped by B - 52s which flew so high that they were not only invisible but unheard from the ground , so that the people in the villages did not know they were in danger until the bombs hit . "
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