Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Some of the men of Charlie Company say that their act was no different from bombings carried out by high-flying pilots?and for peasants the outcome is often deathly similar. This argument raises a troubling ethical question about the nature of war; yet it clearly takes greater savagery to kill a defenseless human being when one looks into his face than when one never sees...
...same way, the cost of constant excitement, of a persistent and violent rearrangement of one's sense of order, results in surfeit. The mind is overcome by a kind of compassion fatigue. The events of the '60s have profoundly disturbed the American sense of reality. The longest war in the nation's history, with the American combat dead and wounded last week passing 300,000, seems at once horribly strange and grimly familiar. All too accustomed to daily deaths in Viet Nam, Americans needed time to grasp the fact that these particular deaths, caused by these particular...
...qualms about the U.S role in Viet Nam, but rarely talked about it. "I guess everyone has their own feelings about the war," he said recently. "I doubt if I can explain all of mine." Perhaps, after the family reverses at home, he found in the Army a new emotional anchor. "He liked the Army," Queen says. "I think it kind of gave him a home." One of the members of his platoon in C Company, ex-Corporal William Kern, found Calley entirely ordinary. "There was nothing strange about him," Kern recalls. "He wasn't the best officer...
...massacre of March 16, 1968, can be explained away as further proof, if any were needed, that war is indeed hell. Especially the Viet Nam war, with its peculiar frustrations, its bloody agonies, its nervous uncertainties about who and where the enemy really is. But to excuse My Lai on these grounds, or to argue that the enemy has done worse (as he has), is to beg a graver issue. The fact remains that this particular atrocity-a clear violation of the civilized values America claims to up hold-was apparently ordered by officers of the U.S. military and carried...
...Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that it is not and cannot be evil at the center. We habitually believe that American intentions are good ones, that America has never started a war, that America is always on the side of democracy and justice and liberty, that Americans are unusually innocent, generous and good in their relationships with other people...