Word: viet
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...Many antiwar protesters were sincerely trying to find answers to the profound moral questions Viet Nam raised about the legitimate uses of American power, and about the nature of the struggle in Indochina. The questions the war raised--in some ways, still raises--were endless. Were the Americans acting as idealists, honoring a treaty commitment to an ally and defending freedom against Communist aggression? Or were they anti-Communist crusaders who committed atrocities against a land of peasants? Were the North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh austere and virtuous folk heroes, or murderous, Stalinist totalitarians who committed barbarities far worse...
...Viet Nam was a crisis of the American identity. It was often said that Americans lost their innocence there, which, if true, may not have been an altogether bad thing. Innocence allied to great power may be refreshing but can be very dangerous...
...mixed feelings about it all," says Corkan. He does not have nightmares anymore, but sometimes in the deep of night, he blurts out in his sleep, "Who's on guard?" Sitting in the George N. Meredith V.F.W. Post 924 in Anniston, Ala., Corkan says slowly, "I don't know. Viet Nam just stays on your mind...
Michael Herr, in his book Dispatches, says that "Viet Nam was what we had instead of happy childhoods." Narcissism again. But there is a mature sense in which it is true. Viet Nam may have been a hallucination. It was surely a warning, though one not always easy to read. It was also a kind of national rite of passage, a great power learning Kipling's lesson the hard way. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer describes how a tribesman chosen to be king must be enchained and thrashed before his coronation. The moral may be that a nation...
...Ambassador Graham Martin had behaved for weeks as if South Viet Nam was not going to fall at all, whistling with glum urbanity through the Asian Gotterdammerung. He did not want to start a panic. Now, at 3:30 on the morning of Wednesday, April 30, 1975, President Ford flashed orders from the White House for Martin to board a helicopter on the embassy roof and get to the U.S. fleet in the South China...