Get ready for the next round in the battle over the Vietnam War [View all]

[Zorro]

There are two Vietnam wars, and the second is still going 40 years after the first ended. The United States fought the first one from 1959 to 1975 in the jungles, villages and airspace of Indochina. The second is the war over how that war, the first lost war in America’s national history, is remembered. This month, as Ken Burns’ 10-part Vietnam documentary is aired on PBS, the second conflict is sure to heat up again with renewed intensity.

The positions will be fiercely argued. What was the war good for? Absolutely nothing, as the 1970 song put it? Or was it a heroic cause? The most important — and poignant — group who will offer answers to these questions is Vietnam veterans themselves.

They see themselves reflected, against the roll of the dead, on the black granite walls of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, or in the faces of Frederick Hart’s evocative sculpture of three soldiers nearby.

Many who served came home and got on with their lives, whatever the wounds and scars of war. A more visible subset of aging warriors sits astride motorcycles in Veterans Day parades or stands in the median strips of our streets holding cardboard placards. They live their lives as war survivors. They ponder what might have been.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reston-vietnam-refought-20170903-story.html