Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Many civilians were lifted from the roof of the Pittman apartments. Of the vast American military commitment to Viet Nam, only eleven Marines remained on the embassy roof. Crowds of Vietnamese by this time were looting the embassy. A man's arm smashed through the window of the door leading to the rooftop helipad. A Marine jerked the arm down smartly onto the broken glass, and as the Marines waited for their deliverance, they alternated between studying the sky to the southeast and raking arms across the glass to keep the Vietnamese at bay. A Chinook-46 escorted...
Thus did the Americans leave Viet Nam, after 16 years, 58,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and $150 billion expended...
Sometimes, in the American context, it is difficult to know whether to judge the Viet Nam era in historical terms or in psychiatric terms. One can look at it coolly, from the outside, as geopolitics, weighing the gains and losses and ironies of the war. But then there comes, even to the civilian (we are all, beyond a certain age, veterans of Viet Nam), a vivid flashback, and the mind fills with the war again. It comes back and back and back. Charles de Gaulle called Viet Nam "rotten country," and he was right in a psychic as well...
...Viet Nam left the nation with a massive and interlocking sense of bad conscience. Says Pollster Daniel Yankelovich: "Those who didn't serve have a bad conscience. Those who did and those who supported the war and then changed their minds have a bad conscience. And the way we treated the soldiers who served there gives us all a bad conscience." Those who fought in the war carried a burden of guilt unrelieved by the customary rites of absolution, by the parades, the welcome home, the collective embrace that gathers a soldier back into the fold of the community after...
...particular idiocy of Pentagon practice that men went to Viet Nam alone, stayed for a year and then came back alone. The policy ensured that 1) there was rarely any soldier in a combat zone who had more than a few months' experience at it, and 2) the men thus rotated in and out tended to feel isolated, not part of the unit...