"Dan Simmons - E-Ticket to 'Namland (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

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E-TICKET TO 'NAMLAND

by

Dan Simmons

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INTRODUCTION

I was born in 1948. By the time Kennedy was elected in 1960, World War II seemed like ancient
history. Not just to me ... everything is ancient history to a twelve-year-old .... but, I
believe, to most people in America then. The countless veterans had come home, and while many
individuals had to deal with the traumas of war, the vast majority of them put the war behind them
in various ways: went on to school on the GI Bill or got on with starting families, bought homes,
and renewed their lives. Many of the men and women in my parents' generation had changed during
the war, but most for the better. Travel and combat had brought some half-sensed maturity to the
men; work and participation in the war effort had brought some inexpressable confidence and
widening of horizons to the women. America had changed forever-gone forever was the isolationist,
essentially rural nation recovering from the trauma of the Depression. I was born into the world's
greatest superpower. We had the Bomb, economic prosperity, an unlimited future, and a young
president who promised a New Frontier.

World War II was ancient history. Fifteen years had passed since our victory over the
dictatorships, and even the brutal dress rehearsal of Korea hadn't changed our optimism. The real
war was long ago and far away.

As I write this, fifteen years have passed since the last Americans fled Vietnam. Seventeen years
have gone by since we withdrew our fighting forces. Two decades-a fifth of our century-have
elapsed since the height of our involvement there. Yet, I feel, we're just beginning to find some
collective peace of mind about Vietnam.

I suppose someone has suggested the parallel (it may be a cliche by now, for all I know), but it
occurs to me that the stages of our national response to the trauma of Vietnam closely reflect the
classic stages of response to the death of a loved one or the reaction to learning one has a
terminal illness. just look at.our movies about Vietnam over the past twenty years.

First, denial: No major films. Nada.

Then anger: The cathartic "Coming Home" mental rewrites where the veterans were either anti-war
martyrs or nutcases, followed by the revisionist fantasies of Rambo and his clones.

Then depression: The one brilliant depiction of the war was "Apocalypse Now,' but Coppola jumped a
stage in our recovery cycle so his effort was shunned. If he had waited until after we'd sickened
of our Rambo fantasies, the film would have been received quite differently.