Word: nam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Bitter vignettes from the American home front after Viet Nam? No, those complaints came last week from the pages of the Soviet Communist Party daily Pravda. They apparently were a bid to whip up concern for the sacrifices made by servicemen in the estimated 115,000-member Soviet force occupying Afghanistan. One letter writer from Volgograd wondered why tombstones of Soviet soldiers make no mention of service in Afghanistan. "The war is still going," she wrote, "and we are already trying to blot it from our memories...
...motif. Michael Dukakis tries to overcome a bookish mien by telling a TV audience that he ran a "pretty credible 57th" in the 1951 Boston Marathon and was "always out on the ball fields and playing fields." Albert Gore in most speeches cites his Army service in Viet Nam. Bruce Babbitt, who has pedaled his ten-speed across Iowa and climbed a mountain in New Hampshire, is described in one of his TV commercials as "coming from a frontier family that lives by simple truths...
...foreign affairs, all the Democrats, save Jesse Jackson, attempt to persuade voters that they have outgrown the McGovernite aversion to strong action abroad. Yet most of them oppose specific intervention in almost every case, giving the impression that the Viet Nam syndrome still governs their thinking. On the question of reflagging Kuwaiti tankers, for example, only Gore supports the White House. Thus gritty rhetoric often looks like mere posturing. Says Alvin From, executive director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council: "Tough talk does not substitute for a credible sense that a candidate will really fight for something...
...battle, Oliver Stone glared across the littered landscape of buy and sell orders, coffee cups, telephones and blinking green computer monitors. "Remember," the director of Platoon ordered the brigade of button-down young actors, "you're supposed to be making money." Loads of it, in fact. The Viet Nam soldier turned Oscar- winning filmmaker was on location in New York City to film Wall Street, a $15 million 20th Century-Fox production about the rise and fall of an ambitious young stockbroker, starring Charlie Sheen, his father Martin, Daryl Hannah and Michael Douglas. "I would have never cut the mustard...
While it may seem like a long leap -- both culturally and conceptually -- from the steaming jungles of Viet Nam to the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Stone had his problems with both. "I don't like to work in an office," he complains. "Being under fluorescent light for two weeks is almost equivalent to being under 105 degrees sun in the Philippines." Stone is not the only Platoon veteran who thinks so. Charlie Sheen traded his M-16 for an M.B.A. to play an overeager stockbroker named Bud Fox. The actor found the white-collar trenches of Gotham "much worse. When...