Until peace comes, or if it does not come, our course is clear.  We will act as we must to help protect the independence of the valiant people of South Vietnam.  We will strive to limit the conflict, for we wish neither increased destruction nor do we want to invite increased danger.

But we will give our fighting men what they must have:  every gun, and every dollar, and every decision—­whatever the cost or whatever the challenge.

And we will continue to help the people of South Vietnam care for those that are ravaged by battle, create progress in the villages, and carry forward the healing hopes of peace as best they can amidst the uncertain terrors of war.

And let me be absolutely clear:  The days may become months, and the months may become years, but we will stay as long as aggression commands us to battle.

There may be some who do not want peace, whose ambitions stretch so far that war in Vietnam is but a welcome and convenient episode in an immense design to subdue history to their will.  But for others it must now be clear—­the choice is not between peace and victory, it lies between peace and the ravages of a conflict from which they can only lose.

The people of Vietnam, North and South, seek the same things:  the shared needs of man, the needs for food and shelter and education—­the chance to build and work and till the soil, free from the arbitrary horrors of battle—­the desire to walk in the dignity of those who master their own destiny.  For many painful years, in war and revolution and infrequent peace, they have struggled to fulfill those needs.

It is a crime against mankind that so much courage, and so much will, and so many dreams, must be flung on the fires of war and death.

To all of those caught up in this conflict we therefore say again tonight:  Let us choose peace, and with it the wondrous works of peace, and beyond that, the time when hope reaches toward consummation, and life is the servant of life.

In this work, we plan to discharge our duty to the people whom we serve.  V.

This is the State of the Union.

But over it all—­wealth, and promise, and expectation—­lies our troubling awareness of American men at war tonight.

How many men who listen to me tonight have served their Nation in other wars?  How very many are not here to listen?

The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars.  Yet, finally, war is always the same.  It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise.  It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate.

Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.

Many of you share the burden of this knowledge tonight with me.  But there is a difference.  For finally I must be the one to order our guns to fire, against all the most inward pulls of my desire.  For we have children to teach, and we have sick to be cured, and we have men to be freed.  There are poor to be lifted up, and there are cities to be built, and there is a world to be helped.