War and Peace: A Full Symphony of History's Possibilities

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In the shadow of the Bomb, military ambition in the world seems to have grown more limited. If ideology still has imperial hopes, it tends to send them around the world somewhat self-consciously, in local disguises, working the odd civil war here and there, mostly in Third World targets of opportunity. Conventional wars have continued at their furious and modestly homicidal pace, of course, and this is still the most murderous century. War, once a business to be transacted between soldiers, with everyone else stepping aside, is more than ever an indiscriminate killer. In little war, guerrilla war, there are no lines for civilians to hide behind, and in big war, hiding is impossible.

Korea was a sort of transitional conflict, a civil war enacted with all the panoply of conventional battle, each side supported with allies and joining on an open field of battle. But then war tended to fade into jungles and a thousand ambiguities of costume and faction and political subtlety. Viet Nam was America's painful education in this new form. Overarmed and under informed, the Americans came onto the battlefield and found that it was all quicksand and fog. Viet Nam was morally impenetrable as well. Americans could not tell enemies from friends. The war became a terrible waste of idealism. An older generation of men who had had their war at Normandy and Iwo Jima would grow nostalgic for the moral simplicities they had known. After the Tet offensive in 1968, Viet Nam came to seem as futile as the Western Front once had to the men in the trenches, a mere killing ground. President Richard Nixon promised to depart from Viet Nam when he had got "peace with honor." But the possibility of honor seemed to have vanished somewhere in the terrible course of things. War, once history's stirring, Homeric pageant, degenerated into futility and rout, and bodies dangling from the skids of the last helicopters out of Saigon.

—By Lance Morrow