Homer_Rice Posted May 2, 2010 Report Share Posted May 2, 2010 Seems like yesterday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John~Galt Posted May 5, 2010 Report Share Posted May 5, 2010 I wasn't born yet, but my Father was there in 67-68. He is bitter about how that went down to this day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
|Bunghole| Posted May 5, 2010 Report Share Posted May 5, 2010 Sorry Homer, I'm always late to the party these days. I'm of two minds on Vietnam. The first mind is the retrospective "why in the bloody hell did we ever get involved in this goddamn mess in the first place?" The second mind is that we could have won had we kept our stepped-up effort up a little longer in 1968, easily in fact, but were too little too late in the public eye/politics. But given the second scenario, how many more lives would have been extinguished in order for that to happen and what kind of Pyrrhic victory would that have been? Bah. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Homer_Rice Posted May 5, 2010 Author Report Share Posted May 5, 2010 When this was brought to my attention the other day I stopped to ponder for a few minutes. Not so much about the geopolitics, but about the swift passage of one's life. I was in the Navy then and was preparing to go on my first Med cruise--we left in July. One of my best friends was on a DD in the Pacific then and he participated in the evacuation craziness going down. Then, as well as now, our society was in a lot of turmoil. If thought of as part of a longer process, then there are quite a few harmonics resonating now from those quarrels. And we all are part of, and a product of, the longer processes at work in human history. The Athenians/Greeks had an ideal, [i]to koinon[/i], which roughly meant the same as what we mean by "the common good." Then, as well as now, it's often difficult to sort out just what the common good might be. Normal. But, what sort of bothers me as I think of the end of that war and the more or less similar mistakes being made in our current wars is this: just like the decline of the polis in Greece during the late 4th century, our culture seems incapable of reclaiming the virtue of [i]to koinon agathon[/i]--both as a active principle and as an operating theme of our day to day considerations. Sort of sad to be thinking that's one's entire adult life has been lived in a period of obvious decay and dissolution. Edited to add this bit of humor: [img]http://i.imgur.com/75MDw.gif[/img] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
|Bunghole| Posted May 5, 2010 Report Share Posted May 5, 2010 Well Homer...I hope you are wrong. I suspect you do, too. Stockpiling water and ammo is wearing on a fella.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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