Word: viet
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...Viet Nam was different from other American wars in one crucial respect: the U.S. lost it. When a man soldiers on the winning side, the social contract of arms holds up; the young conscript is asked to endure all discomforts of the field, including death, but if he returns, the grateful nation (though it may soon grow indifferent) promises at least a banal ration of glory, a ceremonious welcome, the admiring opinion of his fellow citizens. Sometime between Tet and the last helicopter off the embassy roof in 1975, America threw away its social contract with the soldiers and left...
...Americans can renegotiate the contract, can extract lessons and meaning from the disaster. They might begin by trying to help Viet Nam veterans restore their lives. Many veterans say that it is too late for rhetoric, too late for symbols such as the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial that will be built not far from the Lincoln Memorial next year. Such vets want concrete help: more assistance finding jobs, more time to use the G.I. Bill. They should get it. There is something notably irresponsible about a Government that dispatches its young to be chewed up in an obscure land...
...thanked for what they did, for doing as their nation asked. They crave an acknowledgment, a respect from their fellow Americans that they have never had and may never get. The victor always gets respect, even if it is of a shallow and predictable kind. The veterans of Viet Nam are entitled to a deeper, different respect: the kind that goes to someone who has endured deep anguish, even failure, and survived...
...Viet Nam still chokes Americans. The nation will not recover from it, or learn from all of that slaughter and guilt, until it acknowledges that the men who fought the nation's first teen-age war (average age: 19.2 years) did not cook up that war themselves in a mischievous moment. That was all of America out there. "It was a collective enterprise," says Dr. Egendorf, "and we were all damaged by it. A family melodrama is still going on. Sometimes a psychologist cannot treat the individual alone; he must see the whole family together...
America lost 56,480 men in Viet Nam, the last irreclaimable body count. The nation also misplaced many thousands of men and women who did make it home. To embrace them now may be a complicated, belated and awkward exercise, but it should be done-done with a clear historical eye, without pity or jingo or other illusions. It would mitigate an injustice and might even improve the nation's collective mental health. It would help to settle America's tedious quarrel with itself. Americans should be able to repeat Robert Lowell's line in a calm...