Vietnam was the Pruitt-Igo of American wars. Both had been designed by the same mentality. The memory recedes at generational warp speed. Those who remember, remember. But a senior in college now was born three or four years after Saigon fell and changed its name to Ho Chi Minh City.
Memory is made of a weird elastic.
World War II may be fresher now in the public mind than Vietnam. But in the next week, because of the anniversary, Vietnam will zoom close again in its vividness for those of us who remember it. To the young, it might as well be the Punic Wars. The others in the farmyard are stunned. I sometimes wonder what the furious acceleration in the rate of change in our lives does to the faculty of memory and to the moral meanings we are capable of absorbing from our experience.