“Wars Will Cease When…”

Abstract

When I was passing through England not long ago, a news photo in the Daily Telegraph caught my attention. The front page showed a picture of English students, the Cambridge Peace Action Group, carrying a sign before the married quarters area of the United States Air Force Base in Suffolk. “Wars will cease,” the banner logically proclaimed, “when men refuse to fight.”Today, of course, when we see signs advising men to refuse to fight, we are almost always talking about the war in Vietnam. A good deal of information about the war in Vietnam, its history, its circumstances, and its problems is available to the general population. Everyone is aware of the Green Beret, of French colonialism, General Giap's theory of guerrilla warfare, the Seventh Fleet, Ho Chi Minh, napalm, Madam Nu, burning Buddhists, the bomb, the Gulf of Tonkin, General de Gaulle's theories, Dien Bien Phu, the Oakland Army Base, Cam Ramh Bay, the black market in Saigon, Viet Cong assassinations, the thousands of American dead, Senator Fulbright's Hearings, the elections in South Vietnam, the Geneva Conference, the 325th Division of the North Vietnamese Army, the Demarcation Zone, and General Ky's black flying suit with the purple scarf. These and a host of other images are never far from our Vietnamese reflections.