After the War, Peace?

The date set by the Pentagon as the beginning of the American phase of the Viet Nam War--Jan. 1,1961--was chosen arbitrarily for bookkeeping purposes. It was ten years after U.S. financial aid began to flow to the South Vietnamese, more than two years after the first American advisers were killed, 3 1/2 years before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and four years before the Marines landed at Danang. So it seemed altogether fitting that the end of the American involvement in the Viet Nam War--March 30, 1973--should also fall on a rather random day: 35 days after the last American battlefield casualty, and before an end to the bombing in Indochina (now over Cambodia), to the financial aid, or to the substantial civilian presence.

With all the G.I.s and P.O.W.s home, Americans now seem all too willing to forget about Viet Nam. The question is--can they forgive? Taxpayers already are showing a marked reluctance to spend money on the postwar reconstruction of North Viet Nam. Even before the P.O.W.s' revelations of torture, the Chicago Sun-Times asked readers to vote whether or not they favored aid to North Viet Nam; 1,701 people responded--and the vote was almost 10 to 1 against aid. Surely that opposition has now increased.

And what about the reconstruction and reconciliation of the U.S.? There seems scarcely more eagerness for that. In the same speech in which he asked Americans to "meet the great challenges of peace which can unite us," President Nixon once again denounced those who had pressed for an earlier peace, insisting that they had been a "small but vocal minority" who had leveled an "unprecedented barrage of criticism" and had been willing to "humiliate" their country. If that was the bugle call to brotherhood, it sounded a rather sour note. Perhaps Henry Kissinger and, say, Daniel Ellsberg should negotiate an intranational ceasefire.

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