Word: understand
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...attempt to face and understand My Lai, some contributing causes help explain, if not condone. There is, unfortunately, a racial element. To the G.I., the Vietnamese, both North and South, "slant." is a "gook," "dink," "slope".; The terms, often used unthinkingly, tend to shift the object into a thing rather than a person ? and hence something that it is easier to kill...
...hours of trudging through swamp and jungle and then sees a friend killed beside him ? and friendships are highly emotional bonds in combat ? a soldier can easily go wild. At My Lai, however, the rampage was a group affair rather than individual breakdowns, something much harder to understand...
...took some satisfaction in it. But his failure in school, tugging remorselessly at his conscience, drove him to the Seattle public library. For hours on end, unable to fathom the printed mysteries of its stacks, he pored over the illustrations. In a way that he still does not understand, pictures of airplanes and weapons of war fascinated him. And his thoughts slowly turned to the other culture of modern society where men gather in the strong solidarity of uniforms, guns and combat. In May 1967, just 17, Raff signed up for a four-year hitch in the Marines...
...enough to do if we had time to worry about a bunch of trees. This sort of upset me, since I only average (at most) four hours of sleep a night precisely because my professors do give me so much work. He also told me he didn't understand why we were so upset- after all the university planted new trees where it could- whereupon I asked if we were supposed to be grateful because he planted a sapling pinoak (ugly and little even when it grows up in 40 years) for every 150-year-old cypresshe chopped down. Things...
...Pushing a button starts a voice that explains that you cannot see most of the sites because they are in back of you. It also gives you the name of every commander at the battle and tells you where they all went. You are told far too much to understand anything, except the vague idea that farmers were shooting in the fields. (It is difficult to get a sense of the farmers. After all, they were revolutionaries-and the bourgeoisie...