The Home Front: Exorcising an Old Demon

Hello, Kuwait. Goodbye, Vietnam. Next month 16 years will have passed since Americans and their friends scrambled from rooftops into helicopters and left Saigon to Vietnam's victorious communists. The pain of that and so many other Vietnam memories -- the dead children of My Lai, the shock of Tet '68, the coups and countercoups, the fraggings, the drugs, the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of American students at Kent State -- somehow only increased as the years passed. When the U.S.-led forces raced across Kuwait and Iraq last week, however, they may have defeated not just the Iraqi army but also...