A sad time and a hellish time, yes. But that's only part of the story. It was a time when a war by a strong country against a weak country was resisted by a whole swathe of people, who at great cost to themselves and to the country, halted it in its tracks. And that doesn't often happen. In fact I can't think of any other time its happened - and all strong countries have unjust wars in their past.

I don't think that is something for Americans to be ashamed of.

And as for the Americans who went to fight in Vietnam, either they were doing it because they thought that was the right thing to do, and believed what they were told about it being a just war for a just cause, or they were prisoners of the state, forced into uniform. Those aren't reasons for embarrassment.

As for the atrocities, the horrible things that some soldiers did, that happens in every war, a combination of a kind of madness that can turn ordinary people into monsters, and the technological blindness that leads the people in charge to order carpet bombing and stuff like Agebnt Orange. The difference here was that it came to light at least some of the time, and some people spoke up.And that doesn't often happen either.

But there's one thing that sometimes seems to get lost in all this. The focus seems to be on the terrible things that the war did to America, and to Americans. It almost seems as if what happened to the millions of Vietnamese whop died (one million? two? three?)is a secondary matter. And that is scary, because it points to a world in which,if the wars can avoid killing the tens of thousands of "our boys", while still killing the millions of foreigners, there won't be too much opposition.