Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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AMERICAN FOREIGN policy is in a state of crisis. Before Vietnam, American power reigned unchallenged in much of the world; American policy makers felt justified in and compelled to intervene in other countries wherever U.S. hegemony was threatened. But the events of the last year--the victory of the PRG-DRV in Vietnam, the victory of the MPLA in Angola, the disclosure of CIA covert operations abroad, and the imminent rise to power of Communist governments in Western Europe--make this policy orientation increasingly untenable...
Bryan chronicles the Mullen's struggle, which soon consumed their lives, and reminds us of the horror of the Vietnam years. He quotes at length from the cold government form letters which responded with hazy platitudes to the Mullens' anguish. At one point, Peg resorted to a dictionary to look up the word "prolong"; she was trying to determine how long it took Michael...
...their kitchen table cluttered with correspondence, the Mullens juxtaposed letters in revealing ways. General William C. Westmoreland wrote, "In Vietnam today brave Americans are defending the rights of men to choose their own destiny and to live in dignity and freedom." One of Michael's own letters said, in reference to the antiwar protest in the United States, "Most of the grunts (infantrymen), E-6's and below, are pulling that things get wilder at home...
...there were in fact guilty men who must answer for the larger mystery the Mullens faced. Implicit in Friendly Fire is the understanding that Vietnam was more than a tragic mistake, an error in the limited sense that the shell which exploded in the trees above Hill 76 and killed Michael Mullen was an error. It defies logic to believe that the long years of blood and napalm were merely a tragic series of mistakes dizzily succeeding each other. Men, powerful, arrogant and lying men, plucked Michael Mullen out of graduate school and put him on Hill 76. The piece...
Friendly Fire is about America; as Bryan remarked last week, "Perhaps the supreme irony of the book is that the Vietnamese do not even appear in it." Yet all over Vietnam, parents mourn their dead sons also. There is freedom and independence in Vietnam now, but there is also sadness and aching. There are stories of agony and courage which also must be told someday...