Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead, he asked to toast former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, an architect of America's failed war in Vietnam, to illustrate his topic. People would understand the point better if he didn't make it too personal. The important thing was to explain to folks that entering the public arena was an invitation to great sorrow but that it was a noble calling nonetheless. His toast to McNamara is reprinted below...
Thirty years ago, America?s angry youth turned three days of "peace, love and music" into an eloquent statement against the Vietnam war. But historians may have a difficult time decoding the message of the rampaging climax to the 30th-anniversary celebration that drew 225,000 people to an old Air Force base at Rome, N.Y. Hundreds of riot police and firefighters battled for more than two hours to subdue an orgy of arson, looting and associated mayhem as Woodstock ?99 wailed to a finish late Sunday...
...Vietnam comes round again for one of its periodic encores in the American mind. The war used to make these reappearances like the ghost of Hamlet's father as played by an adolescent--overacting, howling at the universe: think of the Rambo movies or Apocalypse Now. But the American flashbacks get more reflective as the years pass. This time the war revisits in the form of two documentary films, radically different from each other (one is utterly masculine, the other completely feminine). Both bring to the subject a wisdom earned the hard...
...masculine film, Return with Honor, received standing ovations at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It is now being released around the country. The documentary, a nonideological then-and-now account of American pilots shot down over North Vietnam and held as prisoners of war, got the same tearful, fervent response in other previews in Washington and Los Angeles. Tom Hanks saw an early video copy and agreed to "present" the film, whose message has a spiritual kinship to Saving Private Ryan: a reassertion of the virtues of bravery, fortitude and self-sacrifice...
More than two dozen American airmen shot down over North Vietnam tell the stories of their captivity; interviewed in front of a black backdrop, they speak without a trace of swagger or even ego (unheard of in a gang of fighter pilots). The men are understated, even serene. Their stories of torture and endurance--one was imprisoned for 8 1/2 years--are intercut with newsreels and astonishing black-and-white propaganda footage that the Academy Award-winning husband-and-wife team of Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders found in Vietnamese archives in Hanoi...