Nightmare Relived
Maloff, Saul
Gloria Emerson's book on the Vietnam war and its repercussions* is so important that at the moment of exultation an even deeper dismay sets in with the old knowledge that nothing, not even...
...He understood exactly...
...Gloria Emerson's book on the Vietnam war and its repercussions* is so important that at the moment of exultation an even deeper dismay sets in with the old knowledge that nothing, not even a book so moving and absolutely compelling as this one, can win mind and cleft heart had created a much irrecoverably lost as simply not there: a hollow, a void, an echoless chasm, a vacuum, as if the sundered mind and cleft heart had created a dread black hole...
...Richard Costello Dioi:ese of Norwich, Connecticut Dates: --June 6- 10 Place: --Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, Douglaston, N.Y...
...Let us hazard the guess that the famous unnamed professor is Noam Chomsky, who virtually alone performed an elegant, immensely valuable work of scholarship which hoisted the ideologues and technocrats of the war by their own petard and made of the rest of us his great debtors...
...On the bed next to his, his friend, a young psychiatrist, lay dying of encephalitis...
...The untrained ward-workers hounded Gorman mercilessly, were always on him, accusing him of malingering...
...No one notices...
...the bad movie that ran too long on prime time is over and done with...
...The soldier who stepped on a mine at a place called Bong Son and lost most of both his legs is home now, on his third pair of artificial legs...
...Michael Novak, The Joy o/Sports There was a time, not too long ago, when it was considered unusual for an intellectual or political activist to have an interest in competitive sports...
...Nancy Hennessey Cooney Diocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin --Mr...
...We didn't send enough...
...I wanted very much to get there...
...A lot of people were afraid," she says, when the news came...
...Gregoriana University, Rome --Rev...
...In particular, her portrait of Wesley Fishel, who headed the Center for Vietnamese Studies at Southern Illinois University, a strutring, pompous little martinet bragging of his close friendship with Diem, and regarded on campus as a "symbol of the collusion between the universi~ties and the war, the technology and the sicknesses in the American society...
...Random House, $10.95...
...War-haunted, wartormented, it is also a strange book, written at times as if in a kind of trance of memory, its organizing principle in stretches that of a dream, or nightmare...
...William G. Doty University of Massachusetts --Rev...
...The man has a point: who can doubt that, in the best of all possible worlds, if we had really unleashed the dogs of war we could have put out all the lights in Indochina 18 February 1977:116 forever and come home for Christmas...
...Doc Melofski, the psychiatrist, "had a saying for me," Gorman tells Ms...
...In Saigon she tells a middle-aged, comfortable Vietnamese, "believed to have contacts on all sides," of children, imprisoned as NLF agents and tortured by Thieu's Special Police Branch...
...Nor did he resist induction in 1970...
...Now we need a book that can move mountains and split the heavens, and that is the book Gloria Emerson has written...
...Michael Warren St...
...she went as a young apprentice journalist with a taste for travel, adventure, exotic places, having earlier reported the Nigerian Civil War and Northern Ireland...
...per person Food and Iodgjpg extra For further information write to: Rev...
...I envy them," he says...
...Emerson remarks, as if she were the third person in the drama, or the narrator: "He thought she was worried that he would be killed...
...R is our country," he said, "the trees and leaves are ours, we know everything...
...From 1970 to 1972 she covered the war for the New York Times---covered Commonweal: 115 the war where it was being fought, rather than the military briefing room, where the press was daily brainwashed, and the cercle sportif and bars of Saigun hotels...
...but no one seems to notice his mother's little mistake in degree...
...Teddy is sitting there, his arms raised to receive the baby who passed by him...
...attack and gunships at 5,000 feet, reconnaisance and electronic warfare aircraft at 10,000, and above them, the others," B-52s at 30,000...
...The man disgusted me," Emerson remarks...
...John's University, Jamaica, N.Y...
...If a book could penetrate that fog of forgetfulness, Winners and Losers might do so where others---Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, Jonathan Scheirs The Village o/ Ben Suc and The Military Hall, for that matter The Pentagon Papers--failed...
...In the late 1960s the division between jocks and intellectuals on college campuses began to slowly break down...
...no one else reads...
...ANPQ radar meant to see through trees...
...doesn't "seem to always know what the others are saying...
...You'd be on the street and they would face you, they didn't break down or anything, but they were afraid to come into the house...
...To my fellow activists, I was a pet jock, someone who brought the group a little prestige, but who was a bit misguided for doing something so conventional...
...flares and napalm, Guavas and radar-guided Bullpup missiles...
...they wanted to know...
...We didn't have the will, I don't guess, to fight like we should have...
...that the troubles at home-burning cities, an alienated generation mwere exacting too terrible a price...
...In turn, the football players and wrestlers with whom I was friendly would ask, "Why is a guy like you hanging around with those people...
...resent their insistence because it is a reminder of what we have colluded to forget as if it never happened...
...How was it, he was asked, they always seemed to know when and where the B-52s would strike...
...Only once does he come to life...
...She was not a lady-reporter sent out to gather marginalia, "human interest" stories, though because she cared terribly about those who were most directly affected by the war, she noticed everything...
...The day after the last chopper got out, along with "our" Vietnamese and the babies we had saved from certain bloodbath, we pulled down the shades, drew the blinds, turned out the light and switched channels, at a stroke extinguishing the old and creating a new reality...
...Father Duffy told us 'If Christ were alive today, he would be a Marine carrying a rifle.'" Years later she regrets not having "spit on him...
...Gloria Emerson was a war reporter...
...They could have sent two million troops if they had to, if they'd wanted to win it...
...J0sef Fuchs, S.J...
...John's University, Jamaica, N.Y...
...Twenty-four states, I said, three years of interviews...
...Dates: --June 27 - July 8 Place: --Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, Douglaston, N.Y...
...Things were not much better in the civil rights movement circles in which I was involved...
...that sordid shell game, the cruel hoax of the nonexistont MIA's, a political figment, and the UN veto in their name, the final legacy of Ford-Kissinger to a grateful nation...
...She had just come from their prison, a visit sanctioned by the Saigon officials so that she might file a stow showing how the Viet Cong "exploited children...
...Teddy is out of it, sits without moving, apparently without listening...
...What is your methodology," a famous professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology asked me when I said I was writing a book on what the war had done to Americans...
...A middle-aged civilian told her his son was safer in Vietnam than he would have been at home: "They talk about those fifty thousand boys that were killed there, but I bet half that number would have been killed if they'd been at home, killed in automobiles, cars, that sort of thing...
...with them are his sister and her baby...
...She went not as a prophet of doom--there weren't many Cassandras around at the time and none had the smallest impact...
...John's University, N.Y...
...Credits: --Three (optional) Cost: --For credit-$100.per credit Non-credit--S175...
...Anyway, he didn't think "we were trying to win that war...
...It hurts all the time," he says...
...The former engineer in Vietnam who, long returned to America, can't stop writing letters, endless letters, to Washington, to friends, to strangers, to the world...
...away...
...giant computers in.tended to record enemy movement...
...She told him she'd leave him if he went to Vietnam...
...Certain he would take her meaning, Emerson tells him "People will always be kind...
...Teddy, the legless boy, aUows that he feels "bitter about it, 'but not that bitter...
...Michael J. P. Gorman is a paraplegic in a V.A...
...per person Food and lodging extra Youth Ministry--Ministering to Contemporary Youth Lecturers: --Dr...
...It's time to show them you're serious," he said...
...that the generals, the men who knew how, were being restrained by the civilian bleeding hearts, the "men in Washington" who never had had the "will to win" in the first place, which is to say "we" had means to blow the North into the Tonkin Gulf any day of the week and get back for lunch with time to spare--and instead "cut and ran...
...She knows war, and weapons...
...But sometimes when older people wanted to know his story "they didn't let it go, sometimes they began acting very chummy," which German hated...
...BOOKS THE 'WONDERFUL' WORLD OF SPORTS MARK NAISON Fans...
...During my years at Columbia College in the early 1960s, I found that my aspirations to be a scholar and my desire to play varsity sports were regarded by most people as incompatible objectives...
...in fact he liked the Army...
...They didn't know what to say...
...Americans were good soldiers but they fought the wrong war," the Provisional Revolutionary Government's chief delegate to the truce commission said in 1973...
...When he lost his legs, his mother says "very brightly, everyone in town was wonderful...
...So among many others did the "experts," the complicit universities handsomely funded to conduct such scholarly research projects as creating, training and arming police forces for the Saigon regime...
...infrared cameras intended to register heat emissions at night...
...People didn't realize the horrors of war, his mother says, "until Teddy was killed...
...The range of expression encompasses all the chords: rage, frustration, indignation righteous and plain, bewilder~nent, blank emptiness, the varieties of indifference, bitterness, pain, sorrow, remorsemthe expressive range from a simple unawareness that anything remarkable had happened to vague consciousness, a kind of absentmindedness, without content, depth, resonance, to an intense, heightened consciousness amounting to obsession in that it occupied, took possession of, the total being and excluded other experience...
...What ,they were getting were peanuts...
...You know," he says, "if people say to me 'Did you have a good time in Vietnam?' I'll answer 'Yes.'" Best of all was the food, ah, the food...
...Profoundly serious, as imprecise as overwhelming feeling, it measures the distance between art and argument...
...In fact, that book has been written, and will be written again, and again, as it must be...
...and - - b y an action as seemingly random as wandering about talking to those who would talk to her, a large spiraling actionmmanages to catch the heart's truth...
...They had as much contempt for the civil rights workers as the latter had for them...
...He did not see the joke when I told him half the book would he a blank, to Show there was no effect at all...
...We had everything...
...More chilling, more sinister, because less obviously so, is Cyrus Sulzberger's son, David, who left Harvard to serve not, heaven forfend, as a soldier but as "one of the bright young men working in the pacification program," motivated, he says by a "certain amount of competitive desire to blow my father's mind...
...Kennedy Foundation, Washington, D,C...
...Rev...
...Far from being, or pretending to be, "neutral," "objective" reportage, there is hardly a word in her long chronicle that doesn't seem ripped from her flesh...
...Most of the time I wandered about, talking .to those who would talk to me...
...John's University, Jamaica, N.Y...
...All the time...
...He said it did not seem a precise or serious way to go about it...
...Richard J. McCormick, S.J...
...If you add to this illustrative little drama the author's remark, you have a fairly representative moment...
...Voices--images, scenes, unforgettable ones...
...The man judiciously tells her theology workshops at St...
...Mary Buckley St...
...as if, afforded the space for wandering, digressing, stumbling, her subjects would sooner or later walk straight into their inner recesses, the darkness, of unarticulated feeling...
...The baby whimpers and 'Teddy lifted his arms to take it, but the child was passed by him and quickly handed to so,'~eone else to cuddle and soothe...
...Moral Theology--The F~eading of Vatican II Documents from the Point of View of Moral Theology...
...Credits: --Two (optional) Cost: --For credit-$100.per credit Non-credit-S100...
...the swaggering, murderous theatrics of Mayaguez...
...Paul Surlis, and Dr...
...by then she knew its nature exactly...
...Overwhelmingly "we" supported, on the evidence of the polls, the consummate horror of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, our little bauble to Thieu, the Embassy, the POW's and their lobby...
...and adds: "I mean, after all, we did save a lot of lives over there and we did save the country...
...Paul E. McKeever, Chairman, Theology Department, ] St...
...per person Food and lodging extra Sacred Scripture-Contemporary Parable Interpretation Director: --Rev...
...We were talking about the Sermon on the Mount," she says, "and blessed are the peacemakers for they shall inherit the earth...
...Don Kimball Diocese of Santa Rosa, California --Ms...
...John's University, Grand Central & Utopia Parkways, Jamaica, New York 11439 I - ~ A Name I ~ Address mm_n m_ I Phone, Commonweal: 117 there is nothing anyone can do, to stop worrying...
...No, I would never have discouraged him from enlisting," his mother, who was a WAC in World War II, says...
...The young woman, a passionate antiwar activist and formerly a student at a small tranquil Franciscan college, who returns to a 1967 memory, as to the turning-point in her life, of her priest-teacher, formerly a military chaplain, in a class on the New Testament...
...Don't hold this against me" he asks...
...I never discouraged any of my children from enlisting...
...They could have done it...
...the dead are buried...
...We know the Fishels of our academies...
...it was for him "a situation which couldn't be anything but interesting, which would open wide, new waves of spectra to look at...
...There are people here who could think and speak about nothing else, perform ~o significant action not related to the war--the feeling, in the anti-war movement but, I suppose, in a directly opposite way among its opponents, too---of being suffocated, poisoned, smothered by the war...
...only it could not prevail...
...The young man who was to become her husband sat in the same classroom and had no recollection of the priest's remark...
...How is it possible to speak of it without sounding sanctimonious, sefl-righteous, superior, morally finer than our compatriots who at the very end withdrew their support of the infinite war only when it had become apparent even to the willfully blind that "we" were drowning in a quagmire, that it was costing too much money and was beginning to hurt them personally...
...They did not have the ideals our soldiers have...
...Wilfrid J. Harrington,'O.P...
...the casualties are safely out of sight...
...Greenly innocent, she first went to Vietnam in 1956 during the early stages of our long commitment to catastrophe when American proconsuls called "advisors," inheritors of the ruins of t h e French Indochinese empire, were establishing our imperial "presence...
...Lecturers:--Dr, Madelein Boucher Fordham University, New York --Dr...
...Enda McDonagh Maynooth Co~ege, Dublin --Rev...
...Chomsky provided the essential case, beautifully, with formidable scholarly, polemical and intellectual power...
...they were, and remain, pandemic...
...James M. Reese, O.S.F.S...
...We could have wiped out fifteen thousand or twenty thousand at one lick...
...MICHAEL ROBERTS New Republic Books, $8.95 The Joy of Sports MICHAEL NOVAK Basic Books, $10.95 Sports in America JAMES MICHENER Random House, $12.50 "Sports are an almost universal language, binding our diverse nation, especially its rn~n, together . . . . Our sports need to be reformed . . . . But what they do so superbly needs our thanks, our watchfulness, our intellect, and our acerbic love...
...but mainly voices, talking into her taperecorder and notebook, allowed ample space for self-revelation...
...Mary's College, Dublin Dates: --June 13 - 17 Place: --Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, Douglaston, N,Y...
...Paul E. McKeever, Rev...
...The ruins are half-a-world *WitCSERS AND LOSERS: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses nnd Ruins From a Long War, by Gloria Emerson...
...And much, much more: a monument to science and technology...
...A scene from the longest war...
...she reported the war from the "boonies" where it was fought...
...Emerson specifies the peanuts: " . . . the gunships--AC-47, called Puff the Magic Dragon, the AHN1G known as Cobra, the AC-54, AC-119, AC-130--whose primary weapons were the 7.62-mm G atling gun and the 20-mm Vulcan cannon, capable of firing 6,000 rounds of ammunition per minute from a single gun . . . the fighter bombers, the F-4s, the B-52s . . . . The sky was crowded: FACs and observation aircraft at 2,000 feet...
...The symbols of the counter-culture m long hair, rock music and drugs---affected both groups simultaneously and the anti-war and civil rights movements reached far beyond their original base to include many athletes...
...John's University for the summer of 1977 ANNOUNCEMENT:The Theology Department of St...
...It was exhilarating, and he admits it freely, gladly, proudly...
...which is to say it is passionately "subjective," partisan, grieving, mourning--her own keening voice audible below and in virtually every line...
...The doctors had told his father "they don't know where they're going to stop cutting...
...There were electronic sensors designed to monitor ground movement...
...Books confirm the already convinced...
...The sister was there because she had never before seen a reporter and enjoyed the novelty and excitement of being interviewed...
...Doc Melofski would say, 'Everybody knows how to be a paraplegic, don't they.'" One thing drove German nuts...
...Gloria Emerson is a casualty of the war and her book is in part an act of sympahtetic magic meant to exorcise its evil spirit...
...As it was we merely assembled a stupendous machine of wild destruction while insisting on its delicate, discriminating precision...
...announces three workshops for the Summer of 1977, one in Moral Theology, one in Youth Ministry and one in Sacred Scripture...
...Equally sig18 February 1977:118...
...Rev...
...Credits: --Two (optional) Cost: --For credit-$100, per credit Non-credit--S100...
...But it was more complicated than that: she did not want him to have any part in the death of those small-boned people with black hair who never seemed to grow fat...
...In liberal and radical circles, sports symbolized everything crude and barbarous about American life, an aspect of national culture which would, they hoped, be replaced by more civilized pastimes --art, music, theatermas society "matured...
...When he's a hundred years old, he says, he'll tell his children :that what he remembers best "is the countryside, how beautiful the women looked and the food...
...Besides, what is youth for if not adventure, excitement, experience...
...Those totemic academic terms, "precise" and "serious," perfectly describe the book we do not now urgently need...
...At the end of my junior year, my favorite history professor very solemnly told me that I would have to quit the tennis team (of which I had just been elected captain) if I wanted to get into a good history graduate school...
...Feeling, in violation of all the rules, runs powerfully throughout the book, unabashedly: love and hate, rage and pity, affection and contempt...
...Teddy and his mother are sitting around a table...
...Just hope for the best...
...Lecturers:--Rev...
...They could have sent five million...
...hospital...
...We, in our moral grandeur, refuse to recognize them...
...Perhaps some day the children would be proud of what they had endured...
...He didn't mind so much when young people asked him how he got that way-they were simply curious...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 4
