Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Monday, November 12, was Veterans Day, a holiday that, apart from giving me a welcome break from school, has never really signified a whole lot. But this year it felt very different for me. Vietnam was on my mind...
Apocalypse Now started me really thinking about these ideas. The sheer overwhelming power of the film's depiction of the horror that we call Vietnam left me emotionally drained. The strongest message reverberating through the movie is the total madness with which the Vietnam War was conducted. In the name of democracy and freedom, which we took upon ourselves to defend anywhere in the world, America found itself mired in the tropical hell of Vietnam--fighting a war with no strategy beyond slaughtering as many Viet Cong as possible, deploying awesomely lethal and destructive technology but without the will...
...wars involve moral dilemmas; all wars evoke the basest evil in men; all wars drive men to the brink and force them to perpetrate horrors in the name of patriotism. All wars are hell. Vietnam was no different in this respect...
What makes Vietnam unique in the history of American military endeavors is the over-whelming lack of moral commitment the war entailed. The soldiers didn't want to fight there. Our soldiers harbored no personal resentment against "Charlie," a contrived enemy, but they were compelled to fight him by the faceless military command. Our leaders were split--some wanted to beat the Viet Cong lest Communism ravage Southeast Asia and subvert the American ideal of global democracy, while others condemned the war as a futile waste of lives, energy, and national resources. No national policy emerged: we neither fought...
...Robert Georgine, president of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department, voted for Richard Nixon. He was for the Vietnam War. Michael Harrington worked for the things Georgine fought against. Normally one would expect to find them at each other's throats. But on one issue, the crucial one, they agree--the American economic system is in a crisis and big business is at fault. Unity in diversity: the essence of coalition politics...