Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...political stripes--is among the most irresponsible. It is politically irresponsible because it refuses to learn from the past--or engages in a sort of education by fiat, in which unspecified lessons are declared learned and the experience that should have taught them is forgotten. If American involvement in Vietnam was an "accident," or an "error," how can similar accidents and errors be avoided in the future? Those who denounce "recriminations" offer no answer...
...years. It is like saying that actions have no meaning, that people killed and villages destroyed never existed, that the war existed only in headlines and television broadcasts and not in its victims' bodies. Such an attitude denies the reality not only of the Vietnam war, but of all human activities--for if 20 years of carnage and destruction can be consigned to oblivion with one stroke of a commentator's pen, then no history deserves to be remembered and no suffering can expect commemoration...
...Harvard or around Cambridge, have dealt with the end of the war. We are publishing it because forgetting the war is irresponsible and because we believe Americans should be thinking about what the war meant. We are also publishing it partly to celebrate the coming of peace to Vietnam--the peace that millions of Vietnamese and Americans have worked and waited for, and that it often seemed would never come...
...first reason may be more important. The war is over in Vietnam, but we believe that Americans--whether they adopt Vietnamese children, remember their own experience of Vietnam, or think about the moral issues raised by their country's experience there--still have to make their peace...
...center have received a few dozen or so phone calls in the last week from Vietnamese refugees who want to know how they can get back to Vietnam. Some thought conditions in Vietnam would be worse than they apparently are, others were fleeing the war in order to protect their families. The majority of the refugees are women and children who wanted to escape the war, not communism. And many of the men were officers in the South Vietnamese army or businessmen who had some money and wanted to get out to keep...