Vietnam War

WASHINGTON - They returned home to a politically traumatized nation that treated them with indifference and scorn. Now, veterans' advocates fear the country will again miss an opportunity to recognize the toil and torment of the 3 million service members sent to fight the Vietnam War. The Pentagon's plans to celebrate the veterans - five years in the making - are sputtering. This Memorial Day is supposed to be the curtain-raiser for a series of gatherings to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of US involvement in the decade-plus war and to honor those who served.

WASHINGTON - They returned home to a politically traumatized nation that treated them with indifference and scorn. Now, veterans' advocates fear the country will again miss an opportunity to recognize the toil and torment of the 3 million service members sent to fight the Vietnam War. The Pentagon's plans to celebrate the veterans - five years in the making - are sputtering. This Memorial Day is supposed to be the curtain-raiser for a series of gatherings to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of US involvement in the decade-plus war and to honor those who served.

Kilroy was here. That phrase, said to have originated with a shipyard inspector from Quincy during World War II, has been for decades familiar shorthand for the existential angst of the all-but-unknown soldier. The self-expressive graffiti of the generation that followed Kilroy’s — the young Americans sent off to fight the most unpopular war in the country’s history — is the subject of “Marking Time: Voyage to Vietnam,’’ a new exhibit at Lowell’s American Textile History Museum.

The House is debating a $642 billion defense budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 that adds billions of dollars to President Barack Obama's spending blueprint and rejects several of his proposals. The White House has threatened a veto. A look at some of the bill's disputed provisions: —Domestic base closings. The Pentagon is calling for another round of closings, but congressional Republicans and Democrats snubbed this proposal in an election year amid questions about the savings from previous rounds.

Rhode Island is honoring veterans of the Vietnam War. A legislative committee has scheduled a Statehouse ceremony Monday to observe the 51st anniversary of the war. Speakers at the event include Gov. Lincoln Chafee (CHAY'-fee), Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Kevin McBride, House Speaker Gordon Fox and others. House Rep. Raymond Gallison says Vietnam veterans endured "agonizing and eternally haunting conditions" during the war and were not properly honored when they returned.

A mass grave has been found containing the remains of 23 communist soldiers believed to have been killed during the Tet Offensive, seen by many as the turning point of the Vietnam War. Col. Nguyen Minh Hung of provincial military command in central Khanh Hoa province said Tuesday that construction workers who were expanding a highway found the site last week. He says it took 30 soldiers and militiamen six days to recover the remains, none of which were identified. The soldiers were believed to have been killed while withdrawing after attacking an airport and the...

NEW YORK - George Esper, the tenacious Associated Press correspondent who refused to leave his post in the last days of the Vietnam War, remaining behind to cover the fall of Saigon, has died. He was 79. Mr. Esper, who later worked for the AP as a special correspondent based in Boston, died in his sleep Thursday night, his son, Thomas, said yesterday. Mr. Esper logged 10 years in Vietnam, the last two as AP's bureau chief. He regularly wrote AP's daily war roundup, a comprehensive report that was a fixture in many American and foreign newspapers.

MADISON, Wis. — Dwight Armstrong, one of four men who carried out a fatal bombing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to protest the Vietnam War, died last Sunday of lung cancer at 58. Mr. Armstrong, his older brother, Karl, and two others parked a stolen van packed with 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and jet fuel next to Sterling Hall and lit the fuse on Aug. 24, 1970. The blast killed student Robert Fassnacht and injured three other people. Mr. Armstrong spent years as one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives and was finally captured in Toronto in...

Donald Turner Jr. was a month old when his father, 21, a Marine, died while serving in Vietnam. Turner, now 42, knows his dad only through stories from his mother and others . For the past three decades, on one day each year, Turner hears those stories from a crew of Vietnam veterans who grew up with his father in South Boston. "All these people have been so good to me," Turner said yesterday at Medal of Honor Park in South Boston. "They come up to me all the time. They say he was a brave guy. " He was standing a short distance from where some...

WASHINGTON -- John W. Finney, an early specialist reporter on nuclear energy whose stories in The New York Times about the origins of US involvement in Vietnam roiled debate over the war, died Friday of prostate cancer at a Washington hospice. He was 80. Mr. Finney was hired in 1957 by the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, James Reston, from the United Press news agency. With the burgeoning nuclear energy industry, the looming space race and fast-developing scientific advances, Reston had seen a need for a reporter to cover nuclear energy...

President Barack Obama is awarding the Medal of Honor to a Pennsylvania Army specialist killed in combat in 1970 while serving as a rifleman in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The White House says Spec. Leslie H. Sabo Jr. will receive the medal posthumously for heroic action when his platoon was ambushed by North Vietnamese forces in 1970 near the village of Se San in eastern Cambodia. A White House description of the action says Sabo saved the lives of several of his fellow soldiers.

Rhode Island is honoring veterans of the Vietnam War. A legislative committee has scheduled a Statehouse ceremony Monday to observe the 51st anniversary of the war. Speakers at the event include Gov. Lincoln Chafee (CHAY'-fee), Adjutant General Maj. Gen. Kevin McBride, House Speaker Gordon Fox and others. House Rep. Raymond Gallison says Vietnam veterans endured "agonizing and eternally haunting conditions" during the war and were not properly honored when they returned.

WASHINGTON - Support for the war in Afghanistan has hit a new low and is on par with support for the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, a bad sign for President Obama as he argues that to end the war responsibly the United States must remain in Afghanistan another two years. Only 27 percent of Americans say they back the war effort, and 66 percent oppose the war, according to an AP-GfK poll released Wednesday. A November 1971 Harris poll showed a record-high 65 percent of Americans said that continued fighting in Vietnam was "morally wrong.

A father holds the body of his child as South Vietnamese Army Rangers look down from their armored vehicle. Survivors huddle together after an attack by government troops. A dead U.S. soldier, covered by a sheet, lies on the battlefield in Vietnam. Horst Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, captured these images during the Vietnam War. Faas died Thursday in Munich at age 79, his daughter said.

I STRENUOUSLY and vigorously dispute Nicholas Burns's characterization of Henry Kissinger and James Baker ( "Masters in the art of diplomacy," Op-ed, April 13). During the Vietnam War, as secretary of state, Kissinger transmitted President Nixon's orders for the bombing of Cambodia with the words: "Anything that flies, on anything that moves. " At least half a million Cambodians (in a nation of about 7 million people at that time) perished under US bombs. A million or more perished in the subsequent catastrophic insurgency that arose as a result of the bombing that...

THIS MONTH marks the 37th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, but Americans who came of age in the 1960s can't travel to Vietnam now without recalling certain events and terminology that had long receded from memory. The Tonkin Gulf resolution, the domino theory, President Kennedy's advisers, President Johnson's military buildup, the Ho Chi Minh trail, Agent Orange, dioxin, napalm, free fire zones, the Tet offensive, Operation Rolling Thunder, destroying villages to save them, pacification, POWs, the Hanoi Hilton, tiger cages, pacification, Vietnamization, peace with honor.

A father holds the body of his child as South Vietnamese Army Rangers look down from their armored vehicle. Survivors huddle together after an attack by government troops. A dead U.S. soldier, covered by a sheet, lies on the battlefield in Vietnam. Horst Faas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat photographer who became one of the world's legendary photojournalists in nearly half a century with the AP, captured these images during the Vietnam War. Faas died Thursday in Munich at age 79, his daughter said.

HENRY KISSINGER'S return to Harvard this week was a homecoming of sorts for a man who has conspicuously avoided his alma mater for at least three decades. Kissinger attended Harvard College on the GI bill, received his doctorate at Harvard, and became one of its most celebrated professors. But after he left in 1969 to become President Nixon's national security advisor, Harvard faculty and students issued such scathing criticisms of his policies in Vietnam and Cambodia that he turned down every opportunity to return to the school, including his own 50th reunion.