Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...1960s and 1970s, over 50,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam, fighting for their country. Their children receive the same Veterans and Social Security benefits as the children of the Americans killed in Grenada and Lebanon--and on the Challenger...
...prominent anti-Vietnam clergyman and sanctuary activist last night at the Law School called for a fair application of refugee laws for those fleeing Latin American countries which are American allies...
...crowd of people was a crowd of Vietnam vets protesting Rambo, and the SWAT team, I suppose, was there in case things got out of hand, which things showed no signs of doing. I stopped for a moment, although ankle-deep in slush, to assess the situation. At the time, it really seemed to me that these people must have something better to do on such a rainy night than to protest a movie. The demonstrators waved their signs. From an upper window in the Hasty Pudding building, three students yelled "Rocky, Rocky, Rocky" at them...
...that was when the situation began to seem almost surreal to me. It occurred to me that these students were choosing fiction over life, a well-muscled Rocky-Rambo as hero, instead of the motley reality of the Vietnam experience that was parading below their windows. Rambo was a hero--tough, honorable, simple, yet sensitive, devoted to a cause, and a cause that was right. You could root for Rambo. How could these students not prefer him over real Vietnam vets--all-too-real reminders of the ambiguous nature not only of the Vietnam War, but of human beings...
...somehow, that this student was a creature of privilege, a student of Harvard University, someone who, in my prejudiced mind, I suppose, should have known better. And yet, although I was still angry, I began to feel I could understand his attitude. This student was so remote from the Vietnam experience that he was only an infant when the evening news included body counts as a regular feature--like the weather. And with reality so remote, who wouldn't prefer to think of Sylvester Stallone as the one with courage, as the real hero, and those (now very wet) demonstrators...