Word: viet
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...that is true, a revived concern about the Viet Nam veterans reflects an end to denial?perhaps even to anger. Says Yale Psychiatrist Art Blank, himself a vet: "America is trying to confront Viet Nam through the veterans; the country had suppressed the war, didn't want to deal with it." Now the nation may be evaluating the long-term damage...
...years, publishers and literary agents assumed that Americans were terminally exhausted on Viet Nam; books on the subject would not move. A buried ?and elitist?corollary of that theory held that since the nation's best and brightest sat out the war under the protection of draft exemptions, the less literate men who went to do the fighting were incapable of producing a literature of the war. Certainly they could not create anything comparable to the splendid output of the English after World War I ?the generation of Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon...
...Viet Nam has brought forth excellent work: Ron Glasser's 365 Days, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, James Webb's Fields of Fire, Phil Caputo's A Rumor of War. Now, more veterans seem to be emerging from their long, isolated silence. They have recorded their memories of the war in two new oral histories: Al Santoli's Everything We Had and Mark Baker's Nam. A group of actors led by Tom Bird have formed the Veterans Experience Theater Company in New York City...
Georgia-born Blake Clark, 35, now works the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, drawling through a nervy routine that may prove Americans are far enough away from Viet Nam to find it unexpectedly funny. "Hi," Clark begins, bunking into the lights. "I'm a veteran, went to Viet Nam. It's always hard to say that. People have these preconceived notions about...
...People can now see the comic pathos of Viet Nam," says Clark. "They would not have laughed five years ago. It would have been like going to a funeral and laughing." For a long time, Clark could not joke about Viet Nam. As a second lieutenant in the infantry, he "found war" in 1971, during the 72-day incursion into Laos known as Dewey Canyon II. Of the 35 men who set out with him in his platoon, only eleven returned. Clark later went through the familiar agony of nightmares and flashbacks. "There were times when I was hell...