Why Don’t We Have a Peace Memorial? The Vietnam War and the Distorted Memory of Dissent

First paragraph: Exactly a year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a piercing critique of the war in Vietnam. Two thousand people jammed into New York’s Riverside Church on April 4,1967, to hear King shred the historical, political, and moral claims U.S. leaders had invoked since the end of World War II to justify their counter-revolutionary foreign policy. The United States had not supported Vietnamese independence and democracy, King argued, but had repeatedly opposed it; the United States had not defended the people of South Vietnam from external Communist aggression, rather it was itself the foreign aggressor-- burning and bombing Vietnamese villages, forcing peasants off their ancestral land, and killing, by then, some one million civilians. “We are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure,” King said, “while we create a hell for the poor.”

Vietnam Rorschach

An invisible enemy strikes U.S. soldiers in a faraway land we claim to be saving; overwhelming American firepower kills thousands before many citizens realize their president used phony pretexts to justify military action; policy makers insist that while progress is steady we must be patient; anti-American guerrillas attack their own countrymen, whom they deem U.S. puppets ; only a few nations send troops to support the United States\u27 cause; talk of a quagmire fills the air

This is another working-class war: An Interview with Christian Appy

CHRISTIAN APPY is best known for his two books dealing with the Vietnam war, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (Penguin, 2004), and Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (University of North Carolina Press, 1993). His work on Patriots, which he calls “the most challenging and rewarding work of my life,” took him throughout Vietnam and the United States, talking to more than 350 people about their memories of that long and bitterly divisive war. The result is an oral history that stretches from the summer of 1945, when Americans first parachuted into northern Vietnam, to April 30, 1975, when the last U.S. helicopter flew off the roof of the American Embassy annex in Saigon. He spoke to the ISR’s JOE ALLEN. Joe Allen, a member of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago, is author of a three-part ISR series on the history of the Vietnam War that can be found at www.isreview.org

Facies Distribution, Sequence Stratigraphy, Chemostratigraphy, and Diagenesis of the Middle-Late Triassic Al Aziziyah Formation, Jifarah Basin, NW Libya

This study presents the depositional facies, sequence stratigraphy, chemostratigraphy and diagenetic evolution of the Middle-Late Triassic Al Aziziyah Formation, Jifarah Basin northwest Libya. Eight measured sections were sampled and analyzed. High-resolution stable carbon isotope data were integrated with an outcrop-based sequence stratigraphic framework, to build the stratigraphic correlation, and to provide better age control of the Al Aziziyah Formation using thin section petrography, cathodoluminescence (CL) microscopy, stable isotope, and trace element analyses. The Al Aziziyah Formation was deposited on a gently sloping carbonate ramp and consists of gray limestone, dolomite, and dolomitic limestone interbedded with rare shale. The Al Aziziyah Formation is predominantly a 2nd-order sequence (5-20 m.y. duration), with shallow marine sandstone and peritidal carbonate facies restricted to southernmost sections. Seven 3rd-order sequences were identified (S1-S7) within the type section. North of the Ghryan Dome section are three mainly subtidal sequences (S8-S10) that do not correlate to the south. Shallowing upward trends define 4th-5th order parasequences, but correlating these parasequences between sections is difficult due to unconformities. The carbon isotope correlation between the Ghryan Dome and Kaf Bates sections indicates five units of δ13C depletion and enrichment (sequences 3-7). The enrichment of δ13C values in certain intervals most likely reflects local withdrawal of 12C from the ocean due to increased productivity, as indicated by the deposition of organic-rich sediment, and/or whole rock sediment composed of calcite admixed with aragonite. The depletion of δ13C is clearly associated with exposure surfaces and with shallow carbonate facies. Heavier δ18O values are related to evaporetic enrichment of 18O, whereas depletion of δ18O is related to diagenesis due to freshwater input. Al Aziziyah Formation diagenetic events indicate: 1) initial meteoric and shallow burial; 2) three types of dolomite D1, D2 and D3 were most likely formed by microbial, seepage reflux and burial processes, respectively; and 3) diagenetic cements cannot be related to the arid, mega-monsoonal climate of the Triassic and most likely formed subsequently in a humid, meteoric setting