War In Vietnam

Thirty years ago, when the United States was fighting the war in Vietnam, much of the peace movement revolved around the college campus. Then, anti-war protest was often associated with words like "counterculture" and "draft dodger." Today's protesters arrive from a different era, the age of a volunteer army. This week in New York, a well-dressed middle-age man was part of the protest. He bore a sign that read: Corporate Attorneys Against the War. When other demonstrators decided to make themselves heard, they blocked Fifth Avenue by staging a "die-in."

LOS ANGELES - The prospect that President Bush will take us into war in Iraq has raised anew the issue of the relationship between an all-volunteer military and democracy. In the words of Democratic Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, who has introduced legislation in the House to resume the military draft, "If we are going to send our children to war, the governing principle must be that of shared sacrifice." For, contrary to that principle, in the enlisted ranks of the military today, "the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent."

Proud to back those who wage war on terror I'm generally not the type of person who writes letters to the editor, but the article "Bank, war protests in D.C. go peacefully" (April 22) and accompanying photo compel me to comment. Next to the article about a peaceful protest in Washington was a photo of a young woman holding a sign reading: "Open your eyes, America. The `war on terrorism' is a war against the poor." I realize this was the work of an idealistic young person who means well.

The Catonsville Nine have become legendary in the three decades since the group's May 1968 "action" against the war in Vietnam, perhaps the most famous protest during an epoch of dissent and discord in the United States. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs takes a fresh look at the seven men and two women who made up the Catonsville Nine, their friends and their detractors in her impressionistic documentary, "Investigation of a Flame," which opens the Baltimore Film Festival tonight. Sachs, who has been making films since 1989, moved to Catonsville about three years ago when her husband, Mark, also a filmmaker, took a teaching post at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

EARLY WEDNESDAY morning, two U.S. Army helicopter pilots became the first fatalities in NATO's seven-week-old air campaign against Yugo-slavia.David Gibbs, 38, of Massillon, Ohio, and Kevin L. Reichert, 28, of Chippewa Falls, Wis., were killed when an Apache assault helicopter crashed during a training exercise in Albania. It was the second training crash since 24 of the heavily armed, tank-busting Apaches arrived in Albania a few weeks ago. Gibbs and Reichert, like other Apache crews, were preparing for night strikes on Serb forces in Yugoslavia's mountains.

LOS ANGELES -- Why are we in Kosovo? Because we have no draft. This war, in the air or on the ground, means nothing to most Americans. The military, all volunteers, go about their business and the rest of us go about ours.On the campus of the University of Southern California, where I lecture on the relationship between presidents and the press, there are more than 20,000 young Americans. You can walk from one end of the campus to the other on a fine, sunny day in the spring and never hear the word "Kosovo."

LOS ANGELES -- Why are we in Kosovo? Because we have no draft. This war, in the air or on the ground, means nothing to most Americans.The military, all volunteers, go about their business and the rest of us go about ours.On the campus of the University of Southern California, there are more than 20,000 young Americans. You can walk from one end of the campus to the other on a sunny spring day and never hear the word "Kosovo."Why should they ask questions? This has nothing to do with the lives of almost all of the students here.

When American voters went to the polls in November 1968, they could not have realized that they were choosing a president whose administration would initiate the most dramatic changes in U.S. foreign policy since the inception of containment more than 20 years earlier.Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign had curiously little to say regarding foreign policy, compared to his earlier runs for office. He spoke vaguely about ushering in a new era based on cooperation rather than confrontation, an inclination to reconsider American relations with the Soviet Union and China and ending the war in Vietnam.

The prisoner's grimacing face, a face caught in the moment between life and death, became one of the most vivid images of the Vietnam War. Like the recurrence of a particularly unpleasant nightmare, that face reappeared this month with the death of South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Loan, the man's executioner.Photographer Eddie Adams' extraordinary picture of that impromptu execution on a Saigon street in February 1968 captured perfectly the brutality of the war in Vietnam: Loan's arm outstretched, the man's hands secured behind his back, his twisted mouth, even the bullet leaving his skull, some say.Loan died July 14 of cancer in Northern Virginia, three decades after Adams' photograph imparted an odd immortality to both prisoner and executioner.

DIEN BIEN PHU, Vietnam -- Hoang Thi Mai, a sweet-faced mother of four, removes her rubber thongs and slips fully clothed into a large pond twice a week to do battle for a slippery, wiggling tilapia, a fish native to Africa with the delicate taste of flounder. It will be supper for her extended family of eight in a single-room home of mud and thatch in Vietnam's verdant northern mountains.More than a meal, the fat black fish also symbolizes the first step in a solution to one of the globe's most enduring problems.