Word: forget
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Throughout the book, Emerson is driven by a missionary's fury at the thought that Americans have done their best to forget Vietnam and to relegate to the status of a mistake a war that lasted more than a decade, cost more than a million civilian South Vietnamese lives, generated more than ten million South Vietnamese refugees, left the Vietnamese countryside pockmarked with craters, and cost the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. A former CIA agent Emerson knew in Vietnam who lives now in New York told her, "It bores me, it's ancient history," adding, as he turned...
WINNEPS AND LOSERS is a book for those Americans, like the CIA agent, who have tried to forget. When Emerson first visited Saigon in 1956, when Vietnam was still a French colony, the streets were quiet, lined with trees and women in silk and parasols. When she returned there in 1970, Saigon had become a city of refugees and prostitutes catering to the American army. Vietnam needs no reminders of the American experience in Indochina. But America, apparently, does, and the detailed portraits of individuals Emerson gives us are far more moving than statistics could be. It is the small...
...Losers is that very few winners at all emerged from the war in Indochina. One of the veterans she talks to suggests that if there are any, they certainly aren't the people who fought on either side in Vietnam. And for everyone else, it is easier to forget the war ever happened than it is to worry about veterans' rights or about amnesty for draft resisters or people with less than honorable discharges or about reparation payments to Vietnam. In a time when America seems to be trying hard to leave Vietnam forever, Emerson is probably right...
...again he tells us, sure, knew 'em all. Three things I learned in Zurich: You're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not, might as well be an artist. If you can't be an artist might as well be a revolutionary. I forget the third thing...
...world glitters these days with opportunities to forget the rigors of the winter in a bout of self-indulgence. The theater, opera and ballet seasons are in full swing. Stores are about to burst forth with displays of brightly colored dresses and lightweight suits foretelling the not-quite-imminent spring. Airlines and travel agencies sing siren songs of palm trees bending in soft Caribbean breezes. And all these delights can be savored without dipping into the cash that must be hoarded to pay those monstrous winter fuel bills. Just flash a few rectangles of hard plastic embossed with cabalistic numbers...