Word: vietnamize
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Oliver Stone honestly thought he was finished with the Vietnam War. With Best Director Oscars for Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and with 1993's Heaven & Earth to round out his Vietnam trilogy, the director had moved on to more current topics. Last year's World Trade Center centered around rescue workers on 9/11. Any Given Sunday (1999) was set on American football fields, not battlegrounds. So what was the 61-year-old filmmaker doing sitting in an airport lounge in Danang this week, watching himself lighting incense during a temple visit on local television...
...After 15 years since Heaven & Earth, why another Vietnam movie...
...comforts of middle age - a stage that the editor of TIME and I have both reached - is that you can start making demands on young people, safe in the knowledge that they won't apply to you. Having safely escaped the Vietnam era draft ourselves, we are overcome by the feeling that the next generation should not be so lucky. Many of these young folks are volunteering for socially beneficial work, and that's good. But it's not good enough. "Volunteerism" is so wonderful that every young person should have...
...writer Nicholas von Hoffman had a slogan during Vietnam: "draft old men's money, not young men's bodies." The military draft raises special issues. When "volunteerism" may involve paying the ultimate price, it is very tempting to say this really is something you should not be able to buy your way out of. The whole "volunteerism" crusade, in fact, starts with the discomfort people feel about how we fill our military. To some extent, this discomfort is misplaced. The armed services are more socially diverse today than during Vietnam or even Gulf War I - even including several children...
...make-work. Only jobs that accomplish nothing important can really avoid trouble. Scandals are another easy prediction. A desperate Commissariat of Volunteerism will find itself placing young folks as interns at home decorating businesses or excusing them entirely on grounds of an allergy to cats. As with the discredited Vietnam-era draft, the challenge for bureaucrats will be finding ways NOT to use people - because there will be far more people than can be usefully used...