Word: viets
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Those who stayed home, or even fought in the streets to keep from going, now feel guilty about those who fought and never came home. Most of those who sent the soldiers to Viet Nam are still pained by what they did, and they usually cannot--or will not try to--explain it. Veterans speak most bitterly about those who sent them half a world away to die and then retreated into silence when the war went...
...Viet Nam reverberated through the nation's life as profoundly as the Civil War and the Depression did. It was the formative, defining event for the largest generation of Americans ever, and it divided that generation in ways that will be felt for years. The war deflected and thwarted what might otherwise have been the productive idealism of the enormous baby-boom generation...
...sheer passage of time has helped to heal some wounds. But it has left a certain fatalism. In Viet Nam, the G.I.'s absurdist, shrugging slogan was "It don't mean nuthin'." Today Jim Garnett, a Seattle carpenter who served as an Army supply clerk, says, "It was just something we all went through. Like when you were a kid and your old man comes home drunk at night. He wakes everybody up, everybody knows what's going on, and it makes everyone real uncomfortable. But in the morning, no one talked about...
...Viet Nam toppled a lot of dominoes in American life. It forced Lyndon Johnson out of the White House, paving the way for Richard Nixon. In a besieged mentality brought on by antiwar protests, some of Nixon's men contrived the various schemes that added up to Watergate, thereby enabling the eventual election of Jimmy Carter ("I will never...
...sense, the war in Viet Nam has dictated American political life for a generation. But for the war, Johnson might have served two terms. He might have made his Great Society work, or at least work better than it ultimately did, with program after program collapsing under the burden of unfocused - goals, unbridled spending and unbelievable bureaucratic bloat. He might have been succeeded by, say, Robert Kennedy. All of that is, of course, imponderable. As it was, the war shook the Democratic Party for years. Among a number of other divisions, in fact, the party is still split along...