American Notes: The Condition of War

Some time last week in Viet Nam, the 40,000th American fell in the longest U.S. war. More than eight years have passed since the first American adviser, Sp/4 James T. Davis, was killed in Viet Nam on Dec. 21, 1961. Boys who were fifth-graders then are now turning their heads and coughing for doctors in induction centers.

Philosophers and theologians may remain forever at odds on whether war or peace is the natural condition of man. What is well established is man's almost infinite adaptability. It has enabled him to survive and civilize, but it also enables him at times to tolerate the intolerable, which is not always a virtue. One moral danger of Viet Nam may be that it begins to convince the nation that the violent sacrifice of its sons, like the perennial feeding of Athenian youths to the Minotaur, is in the inevitable order of things. Certainly the Vietnamese themselves, their homeland a battleground for more than 20 years, have long since been infected by such a stupefying sense of human affairs. There is the chill of a death beyond the sum of the individual deaths creeping up through a society for which war becomes routine.