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I don't know what I think about this. The object *is* (as always)to kill people and clear them off things, so in that respect efficency is always a perk. If Americans had died because of a decision not to use this weapon, their commanders would have been negligent.

On the other hand, Chemical agents would have emptied this bridge even faster, but we didn't do that. Obviously then, there must be a point where efficency in killing intersects with morality. Where that is, and whether napalm is on the wrong side of that point is a decision I'm glad I don't have to make or be accountable for.

Obviously then,
there must be a point where efficency in killing intersects with morality.
Where that is,
and whether napalm is on the wrong side of that point
is a decision I'm glad I don't have to make
or be accountable for.

.... every word I just spoke to you is not just a reflection of my heart and my faith, it is the American heart and the American faith.

This is articulated very clinically when this Nation began. In the great documents that our Founders used to justify their willingness even to go to war in order to assert their independence. I think we ought to take that very seriously because – at least in those days, I don't know about now, I think we're kind of … we've gotten really careless about wars these days, as some events, I think, even in recent times have proven.

And we go to war maybe without understanding what we ought to understand. Every time you go to war, you know -- a people like ourselves -- even if that war is conducted by others, even when it's conducted by a means where you're flying high up in the air and dropping bombs on people you don't even see and folks die as a result …

I hope we still understand that each and every one of us who has an opportunity to participate as part of the sovereign body of the people in this country: we are responsible for every life that is taken by America in war.

And we had better be awfully sure that what we're doing has a solid moral ground or we will stand before God bearing the stain and weight of every life taken in injustice that we did not oppose.

And I think that it's why our founders, being that they were – many of them, most of them, almost all of them, in fact – people of conscience and faith, felt that before you risked war, you better justify what you're doing in moral terms. You've got to state the moral premises and the moral principles that inform your heart.

And that's what they did in our Declaration of Independence. It's a statement of the moral justification of that assertion of independence at the risk of war. And, in doing what they did, they set forth the basic moral principles that then informed the later deliberations that led to our Constitution and are the practical foundation of our liberty.

And so those words in the Declaration of Independence – "All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" -- are the basic premise of everything that, as a people, we claim to hold dear. Self-government and rights and due process and liberty and all these other unique hallmarks of the American way of life, they rest on that premise and that premise alone.