What Forrest Gump Said at the Vietnam Protest March

Over the course of its 142-minute running time, the titular character in Forrest Gump generated enough catchphrases (a.k.a. Gumpisms) to warrant an entire book dedicated to the The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump. But in one of the film’s most pivotal scenes, what drives the narrative is what the audience doesn’t hear.

While in Washington, D.C., Forrest makes fast friends with activist Abbie Hoffman, who invites him to take the stage and share his experiences in Vietnam with thousands of onlookers in the midst of an anti-war protest. But just as Forrest begins speaking, his microphone is unplugged, leaving viewers to wonder what it was that Forrest said.

Well, wonder no more: According to Tom Hanks, Forrest’s speech was as follows: “Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don’t go home at all. That’s a bad thing. That’s all I have to say about that.”

According to Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, he did write version of the speech, but he couldn’t come up with dialogue that director Robert Zemeckis was happy with. “[Zemeckis] never liked the speech I had Forrest Gump give when he was given the microphone at that event,” Roth told Yahoo in 2019. “He said, ‘We need something that’s way funnier and way more important.’ Funnier I tried, and I even enlisted some comedians. I asked Billy Crystal to help me, I asked Robin [Williams], [some] other people. And nothing ever resonated. And then I tried to write some big glorious speech about patriotism and Vietnam. It was a really wonderful American speech. And that didn’t quite work. So Bob came up with the solution of he starts speaking, and they pull the plug.”

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A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2025.