The Price of Peace

Some casualties of the Viet Nam War will never surface in the statistics. One of them is Morihiro Matsuda, a Korean who now lives in Japan. Four years ago, Matsuda put his life savings into $63,800 worth of advertising in five U.S. and British newspapers. His message: a tortuous 12,325-word essay arguing that peace in Viet Nam can be achieved only if the U.S. and the Communists make mutual concessions. The U.S., he said, should lay out as much as $10 billion, if necessary, to construct a "paradise" for Vietnamese victims of the war. Today Matsuda, who once owned an apartment house and a prosperous mail-order business in body-building equipment, is alone and broke, driving a truck in Yokohama. Because of his idealistic extravagance, his wife divorced him, taking their sons with her.

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