A LOST WAR

AS IT TURNS OUT, WE DO NOT reserve all our tears and rage these days for battles over the flat tax and tort reform. Sometimes matters of more tragic consequence command our passions. That was the case last week when Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, expressed shame over America's conduct of the Vietnam War. Suddenly, hot arguments over the justice of that war resumed as if interrupted only by a pause for breath, rather than the passage of decades.

Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, but Vietnam is still with us. A politician's war record--or antiwar record--evokes scorn or approbation; the masterfully manipulative Forrest Gump makes adults weep; we fret over quagmires, and still we can hear the air torn by helicopter blades and see that canted, top-heavy map on the evening news and recall precisely our draft-lottery number or that of our brother or son. Some brothers and sons did not return; they are still with us as well.

If there is a peace that passeth all understanding, Vietnam may be the war that passeth all understanding. In the following pages, as we convey the panic and heroism of Saigon's last hours and describe Vietnam as it is today, as we explore the myths of the lessons of the war and offer a novelist's meditation on its end, we hope to shed some light on a place where memory burns, but darkness still prevails.