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Stars and Stripes and Shadows - How I Remember Vietnam (Hardcover)
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Stars and Stripes and Shadows - How I Remember Vietnam (Hardcover)
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1968 for me was not simply the year I found myself away from home
for the first time. It was not just the year I donned the uniform
of a soldier and took up arms against communist aggression,
traveling to the jungles of Southeast Asia to do my patriotic duty.
To characterize that year merely as my coming of age fails to
recognize the significance of the year itself. Few intervals of
similar duration in the history of our nation have been as
important as those twelve months. Perhaps only 1776 surpasses 1968
in its impact on who and what we as a nation will become
thereafter. The eras of the Civil War and the two World Wars,
although of equal or greater significance unfolded over longer
spans of time, each more gradually evolving the beliefs and
practices of American citizens. 1968 seems to have struck with
impatient tenacity, delivering to the United States of America a
wake up call from our cultural complacency and the natural
acceptance of our assumed righteousness. 1968 began the
polarization of America. Neutrality of belief or philosophy was no
longer to be valued or even tolerated. The lines were being drawn;
lines between left and right; between the old and the new, between
generations and perhaps even between clarity and confusion. What we
were as a people, who we were and what we stood for was cast in
1968 under the unflattering spotlight of war and internal conflict
as a reaction to that war. College students, the children of World
War II veterans, raised their voices in opposition to the edicts of
the American Government. Extremists took matters into their own
hands and murdered Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy.
American soldiers committed atrocities at My Lai thatshocked a
citizenry unable to accept this dissonant view of Americans in
uniform and our military and governmental leaders threw up their
hands behind closed doors, coming to the same conclusion; we can't
win this war. On the home front popular music transitioned away
from the malt-shop themes of the fifties and early sixties and
became a vehicle for conveying political messages, for drawing
young people away from the dreamy and into the heuristic. Being
twenty-one in America in 1968 was different than being twenty-one
in America in 1967 or any time before. American soldiers in Vietnam
in 1968 were caught in a vortex of three worlds; the remembered
world they left back home, the real world of violent struggles
within the jungles, villages and rice paddies of South Vietnam and
the rapidly transitioning world of the United States of America,
nine-thousand miles away. This is the story of one twenty-one year
old American caught in that vortex.
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