What changed his mind was when someone he was defeating soundly in a debate said, "But they're your mates."
Although I did not modify my position until it was too late, I began to know then that I was wrong. ... Neither a man nor his country can always pick the ideal quarrel, and not every war can be fought with moral surety or immediacy of effect. It would be nice if that were so, but it isn't. Any great struggle, while it remains undecided and sometimes even afterward, unfolds not in certainties but in doubts. It cannot be any other way. It never has been. ...
For the truth is that each and every one of the Vietnam memorials in that cemetery and in every other — those that are full, those that are empty, and those that are still waiting — belongs to a man who may have died in my place. And that is something I can never put behind me. ...
a war may be right or wrong, opportune or inopportune, the proper time and place to make a stand, or it may not be, but that this is something to be determined in national debate and not in the private legislatures of each person with a draft card.
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