The following two snippets are both from articles in today's NY Times. I
thought their juxaposition was worth noting:

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The confusion of war, where very young people operate under unimaginable
stress, often leaves conflicts in testimony that can never be resolved.
Vietnam, because it involved no mission of national survival, also left young
Americans like Gerhard Klann and Bob Kerrey with a greater burden of guilt
and remorse than any other conflict in the nation's history. With the
emergence of this story, Mr. Kerrey's career has entered a new phase of
public assessment. The nation, for its part, must stick with the ongoing task
of remembering the horrible lesson of the physical and psychological damage
to people on both sides when a great power undertakes a war without a
rationale.

Mr. Kerrey spoke of inescapable shame and second-guessing about what he
recalls as an error in judgment in a place where the enemy was hard to
identify. Saying he once thought dying for one's country was the soldier's
worst fate, he added: "I think killing for your country can be a lot worse.
Because that's the memory that haunts."

========================================

The prototype bomb stood two stories high. In November 1952, it vaporized the
Pacific island of Elugelab, a mile in diameter. Its power was equal to 10.4
million tons of high explosive, or about 700 times the power of atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima.

Unlike its atomic predecessors, the hydrogen bomb theoretically had no
destructive limits. Its fuel was cheap, and its force could be made as large
as desired. Scientists talked of doomsday weapons big enough to blow the
earth's atmosphere into space, or to raise ocean waves that crushed whole
nations.

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Wirt Atmar

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