I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

I mean when I was working shall we say with Disney, you know they sent me the script for the film Hercules and I had to imagine what all the characters looked like. And to develop those characters, so nothing exists visually when I get the script.

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

So, I created these creatures called The Frightened Ones which in the film you see do have mask like kind of heads and they run beneath the ground to hide. Which is what in fact we did during the war.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

I have been to several wars to draw. I went to Vietnam. And made drawings in Vietnam during that period of the war there, and found that to be a very very sad situation.

And then I think they asked me to work on Wish You Were Here, which was the next album coming up. And I didn't do anything for a long time. I had other projects, and I didn't get around to doing anything for a bit.

I haven't done a book for about 3 or 4 years now.

How do I feel about war? Well anybody I guess, I hope, I don't like it.

Where as in animation you have to kind of do a series of drawings in between to complete the movement.

England was incredibly dull and everything exciting seemed to be in America.

And having suffered for part of the war when I was a child. I was too young to really understand what was going on but one of my favorite pieces of animation now is that Goodbye Blue Sky in The Wall because that deals directly with that period in time.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

You know it's my job to visualize, what is literal or audible, so I designed all the characters, and I designed what they do and how they should do it and so on.

I just recently did a film with Disney, and they put the drawings straight on the computer. And it's all painted on the computer now and not by hand anymore.

All the children had to wear a gas mask in case of a gas attack by the Germans. They tried to make the masks like Mickey Mouse faces so the children would like them. But I didn't. They had big ears on them.

And um, when I came back to England I put a very complex soundtrack on it, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix, right through to Neil Diamond, you know, everybody that was kind of popular who was kind of popular at that time.

After the 1954 Geneva international conference, Vietnam was divided into two parts. On paper, North and South Vietnam were twin countries born at the same moment.

Back in the old Corp, we weren't training those privates to infiltrate into the peacetime Marine Corp. We were training those privates to go to Vietnam.

If John Kerry had a dollar for every time he bragged about serving in Vietnam - oh wait, he does.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

But although Australia was also involved in the Vietnam conflict, I can remember my dad telling us that if we were in Australia, we wouldn't be drafted until we were 20.

There are two types of courage involved with what I did. When it comes to picking up a rifle, millions of people are capable of doing that, as we see in Iraq or Vietnam. But when it comes to risking their careers, or risking being invited to lunch by the establishment, it turns out that's remarkably rare.

I did three tours in Vietnam. I guess a total of about almost two years.

Our purpose in Vietnam is to prevent the success of aggression. It is not conquest, it is not empire, it is not foreign bases, it is not domination. It is, simply put, just to prevent the forceful conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam.

By the end of the summer of 1973 I thought it was virtually impossible for South Vietnam to survive. How in the heck could they?

We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.

If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.

The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.

Although I wasn't able to get a visa for Vietnam, I was able to talk with swift boat veterans to get a feel for the time and place, and I visited a tropical prison in the Philippines to get a sense of what a Vietnamese prison might have been like.

Thank you for the sacrifices you and your families are making. Our Vietnam Veterans have taught us that no matter what are positions may be on policy, as Americans and patriots, we must support all of our soldiers with our thoughts and our prayers.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

After Watergate, America was a ship without a rudder. Vietnam was left to its own devices, drifting along towards its fate.

I saw courage both in the Vietnam War and in the struggle to stop it. I learned that patriotism includes protest, not just military service.

By the mid-sixties, the United States had poured more than half a million troops into South Vietnam.

George W. had a plan. He arranged to join the Air National Guard in Texas, which meant he would not be sent to Vietnam.

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.

John Kerry's service did not end in Vietnam. It began there.

South Vietnam faces total defeat, and soon.

Certainly the Australians were buried in Korea. But I think that from Vietnam on, all the killed were brought home to America or to Australia, in our case.

No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time - the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.

It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.

I believe Johnson understood that the reason was Vietnam. I also believe that he felt that if there was a way to communicate the real issues in Vietnam, that the reasons would be answered or understood. But there was just no way to communicate.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America - not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

These men were wrongfully rejected, the veterans. The fighting man should never have been blamed for Vietnam.