Word: soldiering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...used to have a teacher who loved to tell how he won the Silver Star fighting the Nazis in the Big One. But he was no die-hard old soldier. When people realized that we were killing innocent people in Vietnam, he was there in the forefront with the best of them, his grey hair growing long and a massive peace symbol hanging prominently around his neck...
They seem to be the kind of reader Soldier of Fortune magazine aims at, the ones who listen when the magazine says where the fighting is. Soldier of Fortune bills itself as "the journal of professional adventurers"--read mercenaries. It features gory pictures and special articles on the latest weaponery, and carries the latest rumors on who is paying men for "adventures" in what country...
...pages of the winter '77 issue are filled with classified ads like "Vietnam vet, experienced, seeks high-risk, high-pay work anywhere in the world." The seekers are the sad legacy of Vietnam. They know how to fight, but not what to fight for--unless the draft or a soldier's salary is a good basis for killing people. The ads do not read, "Good soldier seeks just and true cause to support...
...Soldier of Fortune features mayhem and violence for its own sake. For them, killing is pure technique. But technique begs application. It's scary. It's just plain scary...
...starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis." The needs of the law were fulfilled at the official inquiry: "The deceased did kill and slay herself by refusing to eat whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed." Neither statement could satisfy those who knew Simone Weil as a philosopher, teacher, factory worker, soldier, writer and friend. Her mind was not a scale to be tipped between sanity and insanity but a fixed crystal that gathered every crucial political and spiritual crisis of her time into a point of devouring intensity. She shattered at the age of 34 attempting that most difficult of 20th...