Volume 19, Number 2 · August 10, 1972
Voices No One Wants to Hear
By Gloria Emerson
Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War
compiled with an Introduction and Preface by Fred Branfman
Harper & Row, 160 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Americans cannot perceive—even the most decent among us—the suffering caused by the United States air war in Indochina and how huge are the graveyards we have created there. To a reporter recently returned from Vietnam, it often seems that much of our fury and fear is reserved for busing, abortion, mugging, and liberation of some kind. Our deepest emotions are wired to baseball players. As Anthony Lewis once wrote, our military technology is so advanced that we kill at a distance and insulate our consciences by the remoteness of the killing. A very large part of the war's moral horror, he said, has been our ability to conceal its human significance from ourselves.
Review, 3780 words
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