Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...During the Tet offensive in Saigon, the police chief's arm in profile that draws a straight line through his trigger finger and by the leap of the bullet into the fear-rigid Viet Cong's brain: a crisp extinction. The weird surprise of death, the pop into non-being. In the TV version, the man falls like a short tree and his head pours neat but urgent blood upon the street, as from a vial...
...moment, 1968, that mysteriously stepped outside of time, one that was forever bringing the young to dimensions of eternity and the sacred: the boy-soldiers in Viet Nam were connected to death, the heroes to their own cessations, cut down in the prime of their youth and work. Part of the mythic power of the year derives from the mystery of all the possibilities that vanished into death and nothingness. (In October there came an odd, minor coda to the sex and death and disillusion of the '60s, when Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis. Illusion -- Camelot and the rest -- came...
...39th floor of the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, assembling the new Administration, a new cast of characters, Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell and the rest. The nation soon would be off on a different road, or so one imagined. It would be another four years before the U.S. withdrew from Viet Nam, and another seven years before the North Vietnamese armies would sweep south and accomplish the result that American power had sought so long to prevent. During 1968, another 16,000 Americans died in the war. By the time the polished black granite of the Viet Nam Memorial was installed...
...fiction writers would have dared to imagine such a debacle. Outside the convention hall: the massed outrage of the counterculture -- antiwar activists, Viet Cong supporters, Yippies (who brought along their own presidential candidate, a porker named Pigasus). Within: the political machine that rumbled forward to confirm Hubert Horatio Humphrey as its nominee. Between the two sides: heavily armed National Guardsmen and the burly, blue- shirted Chicago police, the armed forces of Mayor Richard C. Daley, whose clubbing and gassing of demonstrators brought a new term into the American lexicon -- "police riot." When the beating and rock throwing stopped, the Democratic...
They failed. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The Fifth Republic endured. The Viet Nam war ground on. The alchemy of revolt was powerful enough to shake the world, but not quite enough to change...