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I have another thread to add to the current Vietnam debate. Yesterday, in my Vietnam war class, students were struggling over what U.S. leaders meant by ending the fight with "honor." First we sought to come up with a definition of honor and the best analogy we arrived at was what happened when the Titanic sunk: many men stood aside so women and chiildren could be put on rescue boats, the orchestra kept playing to stem panic and the captain, knowing he had made a fatal and disastrous error, went down with his ship. In other words, honor was putting others' survival ahead of your own and in the case of the captain, accepting full responsibility for his actions. If the Titanic experience was replicated in 1975 in Vietnam, the students asked, wouldn't the U.S. ambassador, U.S. military and his staff have remained behind and risked all and done everything they could to have assisted South Vietnamese who were then in mortal danger? That isn't what happened, though, and it's pretty embarrassing to see tapes of those evacuation scenes at the Saigon embassy. What do you all think? Again, what was the real meaning of a "peace with honor?" Ellen Rafshoon History Department Georgia State University
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