Vietnam War

Luong Vu asks his daughter the same question each time she visits his Westminster hospital room: "When are my sons coming?" Kimberly Vu sighs, as usual. "We are still waiting," she says to the 85-year-old family patriarch, who is fast losing his battle with prostate cancer. But his sons aren't coming. Cuong and Vuong Vu live an ocean away in a suburb of Ho Chi Minh City, and their requests for visas to the United States for a final reunion have been denied over and over again. The U.S.

Ann Bryan Mariano, who was one of the first female combat correspondents covering the Vietnam War and who sued the Pentagon to keep her publication on military-base newsstands, died Feb. 25 of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Belmont Manor Nursing Home in Belmont, Mass. She was 76.

Far from the prestigious windowed offices on the outer ring of the Pentagon, a new war room focusing entirely on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan sits deep inside a cavernous basement. Created by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell is intended to bring together the Pentagon's top strategy and intelligence experts. The cell is also a visible symbol of how much the related conflicts have become Mullen's war.

Nearly four decades after their deaths, four combat photographers received a museum burial Thursday as family, friends and former colleagues recalled how the men gave their lives to show the world "Vietnam as they saw it." A helicopter carrying the four photographers was shot down over a mountainside in southern Laos on Feb. 10, 1971. Human remains were recovered in 1998, along with wreckage including camera parts, film and broken watches.

On Sept. 13, 2001, after watching footage of President Bush brandishing his bullhorn atop the rubble of the World Trade Center, Tomas Young, a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., enlisted in the Army. He thought he'd be sent to Afghanistan to smoke the evildoers out of their caves, as had been suggested. Instead, after completing his basic training at Ft.

When Roberta Medford retired after 38 years as a UCLA librarian, she decided to devote much of her time to ending the Iraq war. She'd fought against Vietnam too -- another senseless and costly war, in her opinion. Never again, she said, did she think she would see a White House use war as a first resort, as an instrument of foreign policy, and sell it to the public with lies. "How could everyone forget so soon?" she asked.

Ernie Barbosa, a sergeant in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, sat in the moonlight before a replica of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial -- 58,256 names etched in white that from a distance looked like serrated piano keys against a black expanse. Sitting in Temple City Park, with Memorial Day approaching, Barbosa recalled taking his dad, a World War II and Korean War veteran, to Dodger Stadium after he had retired and buying him a hot dog, a drink and some fries.

Regarding "French Impressions," the May 25 story on Vietnam: The French occupied Vietnam for 100 years, but the country's influence may have been exaggerated by those who feel an affinity for French culture. Vietnam has more than 4,000 years of history, and a century is but a breeze on the ocean. Thousands of years will pass, and the Vietnamese will have assimilated many more of the cultures it comes into contact with.

Retired Vice Adm. Jerome H. King Jr., who as commander of naval forces in Vietnam carried out a plan to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and hand the fight over to the South Vietnamese, has died. He was 88. King died Friday at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena from complications of pneumonia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. During a 30-year career that began during World War II, King rose to the three-star rank, one of the first Navy ROTC graduates to do so.

Soldiers have come home from war since Ulysses' turbulent return to Ithaca -- to tearful wives and cranky babies, to brass bands playing John Philip Sousa marches and to potlucks of casseroles and coleslaw laid out by neighbors. For men like Larry Criteser, though, there were no trombones or baked beans.