Word: war
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...contrast to Clancy, the author introduces Captain Knightbridge, a pilot who circles in his search-and-rescue helicopter above the Viet Nam jungle, making extraordinary love to a pretty nurse at 5,000 ft. This non-murderous behavior-this pro-life ecstasy-is an improvement on war. But sex, Eastlake seems to imply regretfully, is no adequate substitute for violence. "People don't want to be rescued," he says. They want to be saved, and salvation is what Clancy's charges uniquely promise: doom and salvation in one package. As Eastlake sardonically puts it: "History is a record...
Like a volcano sucking in human sacrifices, Eastlake's war engulfs everyone who comes near it-including two trustful flower children wandering through the jungle with a guitar and a button reading "I have a dream." Even they are not pure victims. Love and life may perhaps be enough for women, Eastlake sadly suggests. But men all share a terrible curiosity: What beast -or possibly what hero-will they turn into at their moment of private reckoning with the war...
...minutes. The bell's clang seemed to affirm the primitive purity of the whole effort. For an army was encamped by the bank of the Potomac, an army silent and cold and dark, waiting for the dawn to plunge its incongruous, unarmed infantry into some kind of crazy civil war battle. I stood and watched the scene, hoping like hell that this was the way things might have felt in King Henry's camp the night before the battle of Agincourt. For a moment one almost wanted to be a liberal again...
...canisters of gas began flopping down between our feet, the crowd, without registering hardly any emotional response, began moving slowly but obediently up 12th Street. Up 12th, between the massive, dark blocks that were the buildings of Internal Revenue and Interstate Commerce. I kept getting these flashes of old war movies I had seen where a bomb would plop down right next to your buddy, and you'd see the thing coming at him, and, balm, your buddy would be gone. But none of these bombs were really exploding. I found myself laughing, and shouting happily to someone beside...
...hadn't come to Washington to save the country. I had just come to save myself. The country was too deep into its war to be averted by a wayward Woodstock, a gigantic camp meeting where the words love and peace were just as debased and about as obscene as the word fuck...