Tag Archives: Vietnam

Thousands and Ten Thousands

5/5/2011 – 2:08 pm

I have a friend who came back from serving in Vietnam 40 years ago. Shortly thereafter, his father, who owned a liquor store, was shot and killed during a robbery. The killer was African American. My friend’s family is white. “I used that for a long time,” he told me. “I’d say, ‘It’s OK for […]

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Who’s Anti-War Now?

4/2/2009 – 1:49 pm

I am. Principles aren’t principles unless they’re consistent. Now that the White House and Congress have changed hands since 2006, it’s interesting to see politicians and pundits on both sides of the ledger flipping and flopping. Still, the world is not two-dimensional and those who pretend it is do an injustice to reality. I’m willing […]

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Tet Again?

1/31/2008 – 11:39 am

Happy New Year. Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Tet, short for Tet Nguyen Dan, is the Vietnamese new year. Based on a lunar calendar, Tet will begin on 7 February this year. I’ve been thinking about the Tet Offensive because 1968 was an election year. The […]

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Weird Little Gift for America

10/25/2007 – 10:52 am

The autumn afternoons are ripe and warm; the mornings are heavy with dew that is not yet frost, but soon. It’s the annual nostalgia for the summer passed and anxiety for the winter to be endured. I was staring through the window at the blaze orange of a sugar maple the other day, caught up […]

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The March of Folly

8/16/2007 – 11:09 am

Historian Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for The Guns of August, her magisterial study of how the European powers blundered into World War I. An early reader of the book was John F. Kennedy, who applied the lessons of that book to help the US avoid similar blunders during the tense days […]

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