Vietnam - the legacy

The internal strife bequeathed by Vietnam has proved almost as intractable as the war itself. 

As everyone knows, more American soldiers have killed themselves – often after killing other people first – in the years since the war than actually died in battle. 

InDispatches, Michael Herr describes meeting an ocean-eyed Lurp (a former member of a Long Range Patrol) who, between tours, would stick a hunting rifle out of the window of his parents’ home and draw aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real uptight,’ he tells Herr. 

In Thom Jones’s ‘Break on Through’, the incredibly savage Baggit also has trouble hacking it ‘back in the World’: a few months after his return, laden with honours, he barricades himself in a beauty parlour with his mother for 14 hours before shooting her and then himself. When the police break in and find the bodies, a bag of heroin and a blood-stained Medal of Honor, an all too appropriate song by The Doors happens to be playing on Mrs Baggit’s radio – ‘This is the end, my only friend, the end ...’