DESERT STORM AND VIET NAM
Nancy Gibbs of Time Magazine makes an interesting observation concerning the way in which Americans have welcomed their troops back from Desert Storm and associates this welcome with the one we never gave the troops who returned from Viet Nam: The complicated way in which Americans have assessed the meaning of victory has led to some confusion about their feelings. The outpouring of relief that erupted when the fighting ended, for example, was first mistaken for euphoria and is now at times wrongly taken for chest-pounding superpatriotism. In fact, there were many reasons for the mood of celebration, and most of them are laudable. Those who say that the parades are too gaudy and grand might, for example, consider them as acts of contrition. “We are overreacting a bit,” says Troy Putman, an accountant in Norcross, Georgia, “but patriotism is such a great alternative to what we have had. A major reason for the overreaction is that we are…
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