Word: part
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Took Part...
...only U.S. casualty of the day's action. At one point, a private stopped firing his M60 machine gun into a group of 20 people, refused to resume on Calley's orders?so Calley took the gun over and blasted away. Bernhardt said he had refused to take part, but feels guilty because "I just stood back and let it happen." One helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Clowers Thompson Jr., 27, saw 15 children hiding in a bunker. He landed, ferried them to safety, returned to pick up a wounded boy. Amazingly, the Army ?apparently without determining...
...literature student at Claremont Men's College, where he plays defensive tackle on the campus football team and takes no part in peace demonstrations, Ridenhour insists that he "has no ax to grind" with the Army. But he concedes that he did not get along well in the service. "It's very authoritarian, just not my bag. I'm one of those guys who question orders." He is also handy with a typewriter. He crammed his letter with so many graphic descriptions of the "rather dark and bloody" happenings at My Lai that it could not be ignored...
That is undoubtedly part of it. "The price of eternal vigilance," says Marshall McLuhan, "is indifference." In the same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths...
...always seemed puzzling how the essentially pessimistic theology of Puritanism could become the underpinning of a buoyant, almost recklessly optimistic civilization. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Puritan ethos not only posits the fall of man, it also implies the existence of an Elect of God. America has presumed itself to be God's chosen remnant, to the point where it very nearly subscribes to the anthropocentric heresy of Pelagius, the 5th century Christian ascetic who argued that man could gain salvation without divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism...