Word: viets
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Most of the prose poems in this memoir of Viet Nam amount to Polaroids hastily snapped before the mind forgets what it has witnessed: children rioting over candy at a Saigon orphanage; a bar girl singing to a G.I. ("You give me baby./ I give you V.D."). But as the authors pass out their pictures, they also provide moving autobiographies. Wendy Wilder Larsen reconstructs the early '70s from the American point of view; Tran Thi Nga offers a far more unusual perspective. The daughter of a Vietnamese mandarin, she twice became the second wife in polygamous marriages, first...
...Baby Boomers' great expectations have been diminished by a series of rude social and economic shocks, from the Viet Nam War to double-digit inflation. Although the sheer size of the generation provided a sense of solidarity and power, it ultimately proved to be the Baby Boomers' bane. There were simply too many of them to maintain in the style to which millions became accustomed as affluent children of the '50s and '60s. Egalitarianism might have been the avowed ethic of their youth, but competition was, and still is, the harsh reality. Many bravely refuse to admit...
James S. Kunen was 19 and a Columbia University sophomore when he wrote The Strawberry Statement, a wry account of Columbia's 1968 student strike against the Viet Nam War. The book's instant success transformed Kunen into one of the spokesmen for the rebels of his generation. Since then, Kunen, now 37, has served as a conscientious objector, worked as a public defender in the Washington court system, been married and divorced. Now a senior writer at PEOPLE magazine, he was asked by TIME to comment on what has happened to him and his protesting peers...
...young "radicals," we considered ourselves the conscience of the nation. To us, the Viet Nam War was a moral offense, not a question of politics; we reacted to it primarily in moral, rather than political terms. Somehow, by the strength of our youth, the nation would be wrenched from the grip of death, cleansed, made new. A "movement" without politics or program, we were defined largely by our shared lives on the campus--millions of us getting stoned and listening to the Beatles--and by our opposition to the war. Now that war is over, and we inhabit private worlds...
Paradoxically, we felt a more excruciating responsibility for the acts of our nation then, as 19-year-olds who couldn't even vote, than we do now. We took things more personally. We felt that we were bombing Viet Nam, and we were allowing the poorer and less well connected of our generation to die there. Now, we say, it's the Reagan Administration that builds and occasionally drops bombs...