The resistance to the Vietnam War in America was enormously impressive and moving, and pretty well unique. The downside to it perhaps was that the sense that traumatised returning servicemen felt rejected and dishonoured because people saw them as perpetrators of the war rather than as victims of it.

In time people understood this, and gestures of reconcilation like the memorial wall helped heal some lf the wounds.

But the downside of this seems to have been an tendency for Americans to focus on the wounds that America had inflicted on itself, and to turn away from the wounds that had been inflicted on a small country far away, which had been devastated, and yet was still for so many years treated as an enemy to be punished. Reconciiation has to take all this fully into account.

That includes honouring the people who fought in Vietnam against the Americans, the French and the Japanese. Ewan MacColl's song was an attempt to do that in a time of war, and in a spirit of war.

I'd like to see a song doing the same thing in a time of peace and a spirit of peace.