Word: viet
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...conflict were practically nonexistent a few years ago. Now there are hundreds of them. Some of the students taking them were not even born at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and most of them could not explain what that resolution was. To many college students, the Viet Nam War might as well be the Peloponnesian wars: both are ancient history. Many students cannot say whether the U.S. was allied with the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese...
...some students display a sort of spooky fascination with war and arms. Says Andrea McElderry, a history professor at the University of Louisville: "War is just 'in' now." At the University of Wisconsin, a student named Stephen Mackey says, a little extravagantly, "Fascination with the Viet Nam War has just gripped my generation. The males in my generation are just obsessed. Theoretically and strategically, the war was really good. We're getting away from the Viet Nam phobia." Mackey will join the Marines this spring...
...somewhat muted form, there is as much ambivalence about Viet Nam among today's students as there was in the nation at large during the '60s. At the University of Colorado, Historian Robert Schulzinger observes, "As the war itself was divisive, its memory is divisive. You still have highly nationalist students who would try to do it again, only this time getting it right." But he also senses a "wistfulness" among other students for the glamour of antiwar activism...
...course at the University of California at Santa Barbara deals with the religious dimensions of the war. Some 900 undergraduates are enrolled. At most lectures there is a clutch of Viet Nam vets sitting in the front of the hall wearing bush hats or parts of old jungle fatigues. Sometimes one of them stands up after the lecture and tells his story. A few months ago, a veteran named John Murphy described how just 72 hours before he was to rotate back to the States, he found himself in a fire fight. He and a dozen buddies survived, in part...
...Viet Nam takes on different lights and different perspectives when held at a slightly different angle. In a sense, Viet Nam was an unthinkably intricate and insoluble tragedy of lies--lies and exaggerations and distortions on all sides. It was as if the war involved some primal falsification, something like original sin, or else, less grandiosely, a deep incompatibility of cultures --and from that lie others flowed, fluently and poisonously and endlessly...