Vietnam

Police are searching for a masked gunman who critically wounded a 67-year-old Vietnam veteran Wednesday night in West Oak Lane. James Carr of the 7600 block of Williams Avenue was shot three times, once in each arm and once in his chest, while chatting with a friend in the street, police said. About 7:20 p.m., Carr, an Air Force veteran and retired truck driver, was returning home from a trip to the store to pay a utility bill when he stopped to visit a friend on the 1900 block of 74th Avenue, said his son, James Carr Jr. The men were talking in the street when Carr noticed two men hiding in a bush at the mouth of an alley, his son said.

When Adrian Cronauer, Armed Forces Radio disc jockey, arrived in Saigon in early 1965, he scarcely knew what he was in for. The U.S. military presence was small, the city was a bastion of sophisticated civility and the fighting was far away. By the time he left, 11 months later, the United States was deeply embroiled in a no-win war. Cronauer, currently a University of Pennsylvania law student, and the others who broadcast into battle served as the inspiration for a new film by director Barry Levinson, Good Morning, Vietnam, which opened Friday.

On this date in 1929, in a little southern town, Alberta Williams King gave birth to one of the greatest peacemakers the world will ever know - the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of a civil rights movement in America that has inspired freedom struggles all across the globe. It is not only ironic, insensitive and obscene, but outright diabolical that the Bush administration and the United Nations would see fit to set a date for commencing a gulf war (which is like a bad '60s acid flashback of Vietnam despite Bush's denial)

Maureen Fitzpatrick shed her judge's robe last month to join her husband, Bartholomew J. Tortella, on a unique kind of spring break. Fitzpatrick, a Delaware County judge, and Tortella, medical director of emergency services at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, N.J., traveled to Vietnam, where they toured medical facilities and took part in a conference on AIDS. Sponsored by a grant from the World AIDS Foundation, the four-day conference brought health-care professionals from the United States to educate their counterparts in Vietnam on how to prevent an AIDS epidemic of American proportions.

Richard C. Landis, 50, a Vietnam veteran and former bomb squad member with the Philadelphia police, was diagnosed as having non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a type of cancer linked with the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, in 1979. On Wednesday, after a long period of remission, he died. "He was one of the veterans exposed to Agent Orange and we believe that's what caused the disease," said his wife, Carol J. Gross Landis. Landis, however, did not join the class-action suit filed by Vietnam veterans against the government to collect damages for the health problems believed caused by the chemical defoliant.

Today is Veterans' Day. I am a Vietnam veteran, but, please, do not parade for me. It would only make things worse. Only one of every nine troops in Vietnam served in actual combat roles. I was not among them. I spent the bulk of my tour working in battalion-level operations and intelligence, with an air-conditioned concrete bunker between me and the war. I slept in a bunk, showered in clean water, relieved myself in a latrine and ate hot food most days. A mama-san washed my uniform and shined my boots, and on my day off after a full night's perimeter guard, I could hitch a ride to the PX at a nearby air base and buy candy bars and camera equipment.

W.D. Ehrhart wrote the five lines of "The Sniper's Mark" in 1972, back from Vietnam, gripped by the memory of seeing a fellow Marine in his death throes - a brainless savage flurry of arms and legs and eyes. It seems a very long way from the poem's searing origins in a rice paddy 20 miles south of Penang, late summer 1967, to its latest home: embedded in a gorgeously detailed 14-by-6 1/2-foot painting of an ornate 18th-century French rococo dining room, currently drying in the Northern Liberties loft of Philadelphia artist Jane Irish.

Some people say they wonder how historians will treat the war in the Persian Gulf. I have no doubt as to how historians will treat the war. They will deal with it in one of two ways. They will either puzzle as to how the United States managed to involve itself in a costly war in the Middle East for such unclear goals. Or they will puzzle as to why Americans seemed so reluctant to undertake a task that was clearly so necessary and simple. They will, of course, have a great advantage.

The big losers in the Persian Gulf war - after Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan - will be those intellectuals and pundits who have made their mark proclaiming the decline of America. The Reagan defense buildup was spending America dry, they said. Rather than strengthening us, this expenditure was eroding the economic basis of our power, leaving America an empty shell. Perhaps this is what Saddam Hussein was reading when he decided to ignore President Bush's deadlines.

When Philippe De Broca directed King of Hearts in 1966, the carnage in Vietnam was growing worse and the film's spirited assault on the lunacies of war found a receptive young audience that made it an art-house staple for years. There was assuredly nothing new in the assertion that the line between madness and sanity is blurred and shifting. When placed in the context of World War I, the conflict that redefined mindless slaughter, the line seems non-existent. De Broca dramatizes this idea through the mission of a Scottish soldier (Alan Bates)