Word: viets
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...afternoon sun of California's San Fernando Valley. In the lobby of Building Four, some men in their 30s congregate, self-consciously checking their watches. One is a musician; another a Los Angeles policeman; two are unemployed; two have police records. They have only one thing in common: Viet...
Well, everyone is getting older now. A child who was born during the Tet offensive of early 1968 is already a teenager. The last helicopter went whumping ignominiously off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon more than six years ago. And the Viet Nam veterans are not kids any more. They are losing hair and getting fat and sighting down the road toward middle age. Why is it that so many of them, so many of those Americans who fought the war, still return to it with sharp, deep, sometimes obsessive memories?tonguing the bad tooth, re-enacting the most...
...summer of 1981, the war in Viet Nam is re-emerging as an item of profoundly unfinished moral and psychological business. It is not so much a nasty secret as a subject that Americans tacitly agreed not to discuss for a time...
...those who served may still be suffering from substantial psychological problems. They get flashbacks, nightmares, depression, startle reactions, and that wild red haze of rage in the brain when self-control goes and adrenaline shakes the whole frame, and some terrific violence struggles to cut loose. That is Viet Nam combat doing its wild repertory in the theater of a vet's nerves...
...nation energetically repressed the whole experience of Viet Nam for much of the '70s. All the logic of the Me Generation was actually headlong flight from the lethal surprises found in obscure Cochin China. Journalist Gloria Emerson, who wrote with brilliant indignation about the war, pronounced bitterly a few years ago: "We are a people who drop the past, and then forget where it has been put." But the war in Viet Nam cannot be discarded with impetuous American blitheness. The civic and psychic mechanics don't work that way. The men (and as many as 7,500 women...