Replies to post #318260 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

The Agent Orange (dioxin) toll continues to this day.

I know several guys who died fairly young from weird cancers. One of them had a daughter born without a hand.

The continuing damage of that sort on the Vietnamese side is immeasurable.

[blackhawks]

I think that there were two similar cathartic moments for Vietnam Vets and for U.S. citizens.

The dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial and the welcome home for the Persian Gulf War vets; a combination of memorialization and a little too over the top triumphalism, roughly nine years apart.

In the late 80s, maybe the early 90s, Australia finally decided to hold welcome home parades for its Vietnam veterans. This was nearly 20 years after they had arrived home. The veterans attended these parades en masse, and it was a massive cathartic experience for them. They finally felt welcomed home.

[blackhawks]

Hell Sucks....from "Dispatches".

The best writing on the Vietnam war I've ever read; it was serialized in Esquire Mag in '68. I was stunned by it.

Warning: NOT for the squeamish.

A defining story of the Vietnam war.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a46147/hell-sucks-michael-herr/

Michael Herr spent six years trying unsuccessfully to get into the pages of Esquire when he approached Harold Hayes about being the magazine’s Vietnam correspondent in the spring of 1967. Though the anti-war movement had begun, Herr still needed to make a case for why Esquire should devote considerable space to the conflict.

In a letter to Hayes, he wrote: “As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact of our time, it goes deeper than anything my generation has known, even deeper, I’m afraid, than Kennedy’s murder. No matter when it ends or how it ends, it will leave a mark on this country like the trail of slime that a sand slug leaves, a lasting taint.”

He got that right. Prescient he was.

Herr was in Vietnam during the TET Offensive and “Hell Sucks” was the first of several devastating pieces of reportage he wrote for the magazine, later collected in his seminal book, Dispatches. Herr later contributed to the writing of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket.