Word: soldier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...would demand. Well, it was the nation's first teen-aged war. An adolescent might be old enough to look upon (even to perform) horrors that would make Goya turn away. But back home, he was not old enough to drink. And in a day or two, if the soldier stayed in uniform, a fellow American would ask some stunning, stopping version of: "How many babies did you kill?" For many Viet Nam veterans, the moment of return, that bleak homecoming, was the beginning of a long rage...
...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. T.J. Anderson, Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is working on an opera called Soldier Boy, Soldier, about the readjustment problems of a black Viet Nam vet. A San Francisco veteran named Tad Foster has come forth with a mordant collection of cartoons called The Viet Nam Funny Book. The Viet Nam War is even, finally, good for laughs...
...whoosh of a water heater could trigger the memory of a rocket attack. It was not hard for me to know how veterans felt when they returned." New York Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, who served as an infantryman in Korea for 14 months, was also able to bring a soldier's point of view to his conversations with the head of Viet Nam Veterans of America. In Washington, D.C., Correspondent David Jackson spent time with debilitated victims of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange and reported on their disheartening battle with the federal bureaucracy. Says Jackson: "I understood the hurdles...
...much as the Sherman tank of World War II, yet whose turbine engines cannot tolerate dust; the command-control-communications-intelligence network, designed to control military maeuvers from a central point, which works, under ideal conditions, 38 per cent of the time; the TOW missile, launched by a soldier, which demands that he stand absolutely still in the middle of a battlefield for ten seconds while guiding his warhead at a far-off tank; missiles guided by t.v. cameras that destroy fenceposts as often as enemy targets; and even an Air Force flashlight so electronically sophisticated that almost every pilot...
...given the opportunity to inculcate each generation with its set of values, what will the result be? The all-volunteer force, he says, has diminished the "will to fight," a psychological condition composed of pride, loyalty, fear, and submission. He defines submission as the "process through which the soldier is made to do over and over again things he does not want to do, until he understands that the fundamental rule of his existence is to obey." There was a time, and a movement of which Fallows was a part, that hoped a new sort of society could be built...