Vietnam War

Driven, cerebral and pugnacious, Robert S. McNamara was the preeminent policymaker behind the massive buildup of American forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968. As Defense secretary for two administrations, he wielded blizzards of facts and figures to press the case for deploying military advisors and then ground troops to counter the advance of communist forces in North Vietnam and Viet Cong guerrillas in South Vietnam.

The body of a Texas soldier missing in action from the Vietnam War has been identified and returned to his family in Howe for burial with military honors, the Pentagon said. He was identified as Chief Master Sgt. Luther L. Rose, a gunner whose plane crashed in Laos in 1966. The remains of Rose and other crew members were recovered by a joint U.S.-Laotian excavation team and underwent forensic tests at the military laboratory in Hawaii.

A Silver Star for bravery was awarded Thursday to Joseph T. Getherall for saving the lives of fellow Marines during the Vietnam War by helping to repel an attack by the Viet Cong in 1966. The paperwork recommending Getherall for the medal was lost during that war. Getherall is a retired Los Angeles police detective. In recent years his Marine buddies had sought to have the medal awarded. His cause was championed by Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-Norwalk).

Two brothers of Andres Garcia bent over and kissed his casket in Carlsbad, N.M., a tearful sister saluted as taps was played and the family of the Marine killed at the end of the Vietnam War finally got to say goodbye. They had waited 25 years to hold a funeral for Garcia, who was a 20-year-old lance corporal when he became one of the last American combat casualties in Southeast Asia.

The nation's first museum dedicated to the Vietnam War opens today, after a three-year struggle over radically different views of the conflict held by veterans and historians. A committee organizing the Vietnam Era Educational Center in Holmdel, N.J., spent most of the last year rewriting every word of the museum's text panels and arguing about the role of the media, the legitimacy of the antiwar movement and whether the effort could have been won.

Some people never learn. Roxane Winkler (letter, Aug. 25) claims the Vietnam War was a mistake. The idea wasn't a mistake, our conduct was. Russia had the avowed intent of taking over the world. Somebody had to build fences. Where and when may have been open to debate, then and now, but hindsight is always great. With our firepower we could have leveled North Vietnam in a matter of months. We chose to lose that war and that is something that no one has ever explained to me. I can only assume the Bill Clintons of this world (the socialists)

Television, divorces and the Vietnam War are key factors behind an "alarming and unexplained" increase in mass murders and psychotic killers in the United States, says a Stanford University expert. Many disturbed people who are potential murderers are allowed to roam through "psychiatric ghettos" in urban areas rather than being treated, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Donald Lunde said in an interview.

George McTurnan Kahin, 82, an expert on Southeast Asia who was a leading critic of Washington policy on the Vietnam War. Kahin served on the faculty of Cornell University for 37 years until his 1988 retirement. In the late 1960s he and John W. Lewis wrote "The United States in Vietnam," an influential book that helped to turn people in the university world against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He and Lewis wrote that U.S.

In an emotional ceremony Tuesday, speakers praised the "unsung heroines" of the Vietnam War, the combat nurses and other female veterans, during a ceremony recognizing the recent addition of the women's panel to the still-unfinished California Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Sacramento's Capitol Park. "In Vietnam, (the nurses) were not only responsible for saving lives," Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-South San Francisco) said, "they also substituted as mothers, as wives, as sisters and as friends to the soldiers wounded and left to their care."

Gloria Emerson, the award-winning Vietnam War correspondent and author whose book on the impact of the war on ordinary lives, "Winners & Losers," won a 1978 National Book Award, has died. She was 75. Emerson, who had Parkinson's disease and was handicapped by a leg injury, was found dead by police and friends in her New York City apartment Wednesday. Friends said she left a number of notes indicating that she had taken her own life, in addition to a brief obituary on herself.