These men have carried out the policies the “national interest” required of them and have survived to bring back bulletins never shown on the 6 o'clock news. Now, while our negotiators quibble and our planes are again in the air, I've been reading an anthology and an unforgettable book of poems by ex‐18‐year‐old draftees. But the troops were yet to be heard from. All of us were veterans of many a Reading Against the War, and who wasn't weary of civilian rhetoric and accusatory bombast? Our moral indignation seems as impotent as a spent shell the war drags on like a congenital disease. A few years ago, at a university conference portentously titled “Poetry and the National Conscience,” one of the middle‐aging poets on the panel announced that, as a subject for poems, the Vietnam War was dead.
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