Vietnam War

SAN ANTONIO - Almost completely recovered from a wound left by a piece of shrapnel that had missed his heart by half an inch, the Army staff sergeant was just a few days away from getting shipped back to Vietnam. So, the night of June 14, 1968, William Swoveland pulled himself out of his bunk and sat down to write a letter. "I have seen my men hurt and killed and sometimes it seems there's no reason for it," Swoveland wrote. "All of the civilians who have died in Saigon and yet we can't bomb [the enemy's]

The years erode all the softer material written about the Vietnam War and leave a collection of conclusions, sad and chastening, that will probably last through many more decades of analysis. I have read too much of this stuff, to be sure, but what sticks with me is the conclusion that the definite and definable fear of communism in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon governments was far different, and far more real, than Americans and their allies now remember. You must conclude that the presidents and their staffs, and to no lesser result, their domestic political enemies, saw world communism as a threat, not only on a theoretical level, but as a military force that would come marching up the main streets of American cities like Hitler on the Champs-Elysees in 1943.

Capt. Arthur N. Rogers III, a highly decorated disabled Vietnam War veteran and a former member of the Maryland State Board of Examiners of Nursing Home Administrators who earlier had been chairman of the Baltimore County Board of Recreation and Parks, died in his sleep Friday at his Towson home. He was 67. Captain Rogers was born and raised in Baltimore. After graduating from City College in 1959, he earned a bachelor's degree in 1964 from what is now Morgan State University. In 1973, he earned a master's degree in secondary education from what is now Towson University, and six years later earned a master's degree in geography and environmental planning, also from Towson.

In the 40 years since he fought in the jungles of Vietnam, Charlie Harris has kept his wartime experiences to himself. There are reminders - the occasional nightmare, the medals stored in a closet and the mark on his right shoulder left by the machine gun he carried for months. "It wore the skin right off my shoulder," he said. But recently, the 59-year-old Edgewood resident has begun to talk openly of the danger, fear and wounds that marked his yearlong tour as an Army Ranger. What turned the tide for Harris was appearing in a documentary film featuring Vietnam veterans recounting their tales.

CORTE MADERA, Calif. - The boxes of confidential FBI documents lie scattered about author Gerald Nicosia's kitchen like so many unopened prizes. Twelve feet high when stacked, they are a monument, he says, to democracy gone wrong. They are also his cross to bear. For weeks now, the documents have created havoc in the historian's staid suburban life. Instead of shepherding the kids between school and baseball games while he works on his newest project - a book about racism and the death penalty - Nicosia has been pulled into the mystery surrounding the U.S. government's spying on its citizens more than a generation ago. Twenty thousand pages in all, detailing FBI surveillance of Vietnam War protesters in the 1970s, the files were obtained by Nicosia in 1998 after an 11-year battle with the agency over their release.

John W. Ripley, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a renowned hero of the Vietnam War, was found dead at his home in Annapolis over the weekend, family members said. A cause of death for Ripley, who had undergone two liver transplants, had not been determined yesterday. He was 69. A Virginia native, Colonel Ripley was best known for a daring feat during the Easter Offensive of 1972, when he dangled for three hours under a bridge near the South Vietnamese city of Dong Ha to attach 500 pounds of explosives to the span, ultimately destroying it. His action, under fire while going back and forth for materials, is thought to have thwarted an onslaught by 20,000 enemy troops and was the subject of a book, The Bridge at Dong Ha, by John Grider Miller.

William M. "Pops" Palmer Jr., a retired career Marine Corps officer and Vietnam veteran who later became a commercial pilot and educator, died Tuesday at his Sykesville home of complications after colon surgery. He was 65. William Merrill Palmer Jr., the son of an insurance salesman and a Stewart's department store manager, was born in Baltimore and raised in Arbutus. He was a 1963 graduate of Polytechnic Institute and began his college studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology before being appointed to the Naval Academy.

David Horowitz, the quite successful biographer of America's rich and powerful family dynasties, has now written his own story. Its fulcrum is his account of his journey through the Sixties and out the other side, moving from left to extreme left until a sudden epiphany at the era's end and then rapidly across to America's right intellectual edge.During much of the time period covered in Horowitz's account of his passage from red diaper baby to Black Panther Party functionary to Ronald Reagan devotee, I was a student leader and an organizer against the Vietnam War, a founder of the draft resistance movement who eventually spent 20 months in Federal prison for refusing my orders to report for military service.

PANMUNJOM, South Korea -- Han Kwang Duc was particularly worried this autumn day, when the sunlight appeared muted along the grim demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea. Han, a retired South Korean general and former military college president, was visiting the world's most heavily fortified border, where 2 million troops, including 35,000 American soldiers, face each other along the 38th Parallel. Its centerpiece is the "Truce Village," a surreal headquarters along the 151-mile-long no man's land of mines, barbed wire, watch towers and surveillance equipment, all a product of the uneasy truce that followed the Korean War a half-century ago. Guards glare at one another across the demarcation line.

Thousands of young Americans were on the move in summer and fall 1967, on journeys that helped alter the path of the United States. In San Diego that summer, several thousand young soldiers boarded the USNS General John Pope and sailed to Vung Tau, South Vietnam. The enlisted men among them slept in bunks stacked seven-high. Walking ashore after a 6,000-mile journey, the men joined 500,000 other Americans fighting a war against an enemy the Pentagon was coming to regard as both ever-present and frustratingly elusive.