People I knew in the anti-war movement always felt Jane was a bored little rich girl acting out the cause de jour. Her "apology" always seemed be the epitome of sophistry and self serving self delusion.

McGrath, Sorry to say that people did spit on returning servicemen. "Baby Killer" was the least of what I heard returning Marines called. I knew guys who were back stateside on leave and came back to the Base early because of what their "friends" called them and how they got treated. It got worse as time went on. One of them summed it up this way "You sit in a bunker, smoking whatever. talking to a buddy who's saved your ass a time or too. Then half his head is gone before you'd even realize the what the "pow" was. Then come home and get called a criminal and people spit on you in the streets". But calling them "anti-war protestors" is wrong (see below).

Troll, I group the anti-war protestors you talk about with Jane Fonda. Weekend hippies slumming with daddies AmEx card. There were protestors who knew who was to blame, who set up coffee houses around military bases and tried to help returning servicemen cope with what had happened to them. Set up legal clinics to help them avoid the draft and visited them in jail when they refused to service. Bailed there friends out who got busted protesting the war. Who tried (and maybe did, a little, point out the true villians).

I know peole who went, came back and went on with life, who agree it was a stupid war but they had a duty as an American to go. Maybe they're "in denial". Maybe thats how they cope. Maybe they're insensitive, non-introspective drones. Maybe they just don't agree with me.

Letting go of the anger, fear, pain and loss is hard. It gets distant but never goes away, not really. Maybe I've learned to deal with it, over time. Being reminded, bringing it up, is upsetting. And necessary. I don't want to ever forget what Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, DeGaulle and Ho Chi Minh, started. Or that McNamara, Kissinger, Taylor, Westmoreland, LBJ, Ho and the rest sent young men off to die by the hundreds of thousands and treated it like some kind of management problem. Moving colored pins on a map and not really caring about the lives they represented. (At least LBJ used to cry over the lists of the dead. To most of the "Brightest and the Best" that just proved that LBJ wasn't their sort of person). As mentioned early, when we forget, when it's just dull, dry, emotionless history, it makes it that much more likely that it will happen again.

I've got a lot of friends who aren't around anymore. Either dead too soon, or changed, going through the motions, trapped in some unshakeable, private hell. Dealing with my anger, sadness and sorrow is hard. It seems wrong, somehow, to let it go. Like if I do, then it all was just a futile, stupid and all the rest 'police action'. Something to discuss calmly and reasonably. Dispassionately. Devoid of meaning. Just another management problem to be solved, filed away and forgotten.

Regards

John