Word: viet
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...veterans who made their way to the capital last week for the National Salute to Viet Nam Veterans, an event organized by the ex-soldiers for themselves. The gathering sometimes seemed conventional: patriotic eulogies, American Legion caps, martial music and maudlin, affectionate reunions of old platoon chums. But the convocation had an edge, a sense of catharsis, mainly because it was large and public. In the end, with a splendidly ragtag march down Constitution Avenue and the dedication of the Veterans Memorial, the spectacle seemed like the national homecoming the country had never offered...
Until recently, acknowledging Viet Nam veterans in such showy fashion would have connoted approval of the nightmarish war. However, "within the soul of each Viet Nam veteran," says Max Cleland, who lost both legs and a forearm in the war and headed the Veterans Administration under Jimmy Carter, "there is probably something that says, 'Bad war, good soldier.' " Their fellow Americans are only now coming to appreciate that distinction and, as Cleland says, "separate the war from the warrior." Mike Mullings of Bethany, Okla., a medic in Viet Nam, agrees that "things are changing. It might sound corny...
...last time so many people converged on Washington, all with Viet Nam on their minds, was to condemn the war and the U.S. Government. Then, as now, many of the visitors wore blue jeans, beards and long hair. Thirteen years ago this month at the antiwar March Against Death, the demonstrators invented a perfect piece of moral theater by reciting, one at a time, the names of 40,000 Americans who had been killed up to then. Last Wednesday morning, in a chapel at Washington's National Cathedral, the bleak recitation began again, and it seemed all the more...
Indeed, for all the deliberate notes of reconciliation, politicized discord swirled around the centerpiece of the week's events: the Veterans Memorial. Three years ago, Labor Department Bureaucrat Jan Scruggs, a former Army corporal, decided that he and his fellow Viet Nam veterans needed palpable, permanent recognition in Washington, their own monument in the city of monuments. His Viet Nam Veterans Memorial Fund (V.V.M.F.) persuaded Congress to assign them two acres on the Mall, got 500,000 donors to give $7 million and managed to attract 1,421 entries to a professionally judged design competition. V.V.M.F. wanted a "reflective...
...make it a humiliating antiwar mockery. "Too bad it wasn't a simple war," says Scruggs wearily. "Then we could put up a heroic statue of a couple of Marines and leave it at that." (Indeed, next year, to satisfy the critics, a flag and statue of three Viet Nam foot soldiers will be implanted nearby.) Virginia Veteran Jim Borland saw the memorial on Veterans Day and found it "full of ambivalence," like the country's attitude toward...