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Mitchell spent most of 1968 lurching between alcoholic numbness?he was drinking a fifth a night?and the surreal alertness of hunt-and-kill missions. At his tour's end, he was captured by the Viet Cong and held for 2½ years. Abruptly, in the spring of 1971, he was freed. His homecoming was "devastating." The American air was dense with hostility. Outside a veterans' hospital in New York City, Mitchell was pushed
Larry Mitchell would know. He understands the murderous brew of rage and fear and firepower that produced My Lai. A Philadelphia-born black, Mitchell, 38, went to Viet Nam in 1965 as a sergeant in the Green Berets. "They told us that we were going to make the country a democracy," he remembers now. "I still thought of war in John Wayne terms: only the bad guys got killed." Mitchell was chastened in a hurry; he was rocketed a few minutes after he arrived in the combat zone. "You never saw the enemy. That was the most frightening part. Even...
Mitchell went back to Viet Nam for a second tour in 1967, this time as a lieutenant assigned to a combat squad. "The big thing when I came back," he recalls, "was the body count. It put pressure on you to kill." One day Mitchell was running a search-and-destroy mission in the Central Highlands. "As we approached the village," he says, "we drew fire. The shooting got started good. Then we got into the village and started going through it, house by house. I was searching one of the houses, when I saw a movement...
...enlist with his "new standard" programs?mental and physical standards were lowered in 1966, supposedly to help blacks and other minorities get ahead. Alas, it merely coaxed them more quickly into the freshman class of cannon fodder. Fulton is a little off the point: the injustices of recruiting for Viet Nam involved class more than race. It was the lower-middle and lower classes, regardless of race, who went to shed blood, while their betters observed from society's good seats...
...Viet Nam was like a complicated and painful death in the American family. The war and all the vividly theatrical, surrounding violence of the '60s profoundly damaged the nation's spirit, its faith in itself, its authorities, its institutions. Citizens no longer knew what their citizenship meant; men no longer knew what their manhood demanded. The war cost more than Americans could immediately pay. It put the nation into a kind of mourning; perhaps Americans will not be rid of the experience until they have passed through the customary stages of grief: denial, anger, depression and, ultimately, acceptance...