Vietnam War

Paul Wayne Rabey, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, died in his sleep July 12 at his home in Baltimore's Brooklyn neighborhood. He was 56 and under treatment for high blood pressure. Mr. Rabey was born in Baltimore and raised on Ravenwood Avenue. He attended City College until enlisting in the Army in 1967. Trained at Fort Bragg, N.C., as a Green Beret, Mr. Rabey completed two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he was wounded and earned the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He served with the 25th Infantry Division as a tunnel rat, one of the soldiers sent into the extensive underground Viet Cong tunnel system to kill the enemy and destroy the routes.

A decorated Vietnam War veteran and former Maryland state trooper was to be honored last night as Howard County's Officer of the Year for 2003 at a police awards ceremony in Ellicott City. Pfc. William E. Vogel, a 10-year veteran of the department, received the award during a ceremony for police officers and civilian police employees. Vogel is a day-shift patrol officer who works in the rural, western end of the county. Last year, Vogel left his mark on the department on several fronts, according to a department newsletter that announced his award last month.

IT'S ONLY been 25 years, but the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, like the whole Vietnam War that preceded it, feels as if it happened in a galaxy long ago and far away. Maybe that's because, though it was a big war that killed lots of people, it wasn't really about anything important. The strategic context now seems ludicrous. Not only has the entire Cold War come to seem distant and strange, but the vision of Asian dominoes falling one by one that fueled the American intervention in Vietnam -- if Vietnam falls, then so must Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines -- was manifest nonsense.

BEIJING -- China for the first time will let the United States investigate here reports that some U.S. pilots may have crashed Chinese soil during the Vietnam War, three U.S. senators announced yesterday.The United States has been seeking Chinese military cooperation and access to the alleged crash sites in China as part of the larger effort to resolve the cases of U.S. military personnel still listed as missing in action during the conflict.There are no claims that China may be holding U.S. prisoners from that war. But U.S. officials say examining any Chinese crash sites could help determine the fates of some pilots.

Harry S. Freedman, 53, formerly of Pimlico, a decorated Vietnam War fighter pilot who later flew for Eastern Airlines, died Friday of a massive heart attack at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga.Mr. Freedman was born in Baltimore and was a 1959 graduate of City College.As a member of the 612th Tactical Fighter Squadron, the Screaming Eagles, Mr. Freedman flew scores of missions in F-100 Supersabres over South Vietnam and across the border into Laos in 1966 and 1967 in support of American and South Vietnamese ground troops and bombing Viet Cong and North Vietnamese bases.

WASHINGTON -- After 27 years of public silence, a key architect of the Vietnam War recounts in newly published memoirs a long series of errors in judgment by himself and others that led to America's biggest and most politically divisive military failure, concluding, "We were wrong, terribly wrong."Robert S. McNamara, the former Ford executive who became secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, says in a new, 414-page chronicle that the United States should have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam in 1963 or 1964, before the huge buildup that sent U.S. casualties soaring and American protesters into the streets.

There were two guys named Jim Wood -- the young fellow who went off to war, and the haunted man who came back. And his father, James, now 84 and living alone in Catonsville, clings to hope he may see his son come home again, in either version.The son has been gone since 1987, but maybe much longer. A different Jim Wood came back from Vietnam, back from his Green Beret days in jungles where he remembered being so ravenous that he lived off insects and fought a little girl for the culinary rights to a lizard.

THE CONVERSATION goes back to St. Veronica's Church in Cherry Hill, the night that Philip Berrigan got himself arrested in Washington inside a so-called tiger cage. Berrigan wanted to show the suffering of caged prisoners in Vietnam. When the police showed up, they charged him with protesting without a permit. It was a terrible thing to do. When Berrigan went out to break the law, he didn't anticipate a piddling permit charge. He expected the worst that the law could throw at him, so he could run with it. I was at St. Veronica's that night with a couple of priests who knew Berrigan pretty well, the Rev. Richard Wagner and the Rev. Paul Banet.

William Green, a Vietnam veteran determined to live independently and participate fully in life despite being a paraplegic, died Thursday of cancer at his Rosedale home. He was 54.An Army scout during the Vietnam War, Mr. Green was injured in a 1966 helicopter crash at Dongson, which left him a paraplegic.After initial treatment in Japan, he was sent to Maguire Veterans Hospital in Richmond, Va., for rehabilitation.Robert Flowers, an ex-Marine who had been wounded in Vietnam and also a paraplegic, told of meeting and befriending Mr. Green.

"The Walking Dead" follows four black Marines on a night combat patrol in Vietnam, but it's so hokey that it manages almost single-handedly to revise the Marine motto into "Never faithful." It's certainly never faithful to reality.Give it points for trying to break new ground. The Vietnam War has been re-fought on screen so many times it has come to seem almost banal, but one aspect of the conflict has gone curiously undramatized: the black experience, an issue only peripherally dealt with in "Platoon" or "Hamburger Hill."