Vietnam War

When Southwest Chamber Music became the first American ensemble since the Vietnam War to set up a musical residency in Vietnam in 2006, artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt had high hopes that the two countries -- forever tied through history and war -- would forge lasting bonds in music. Now the Pasadena-based group is cementing its position to help guide Vietnam's musical future. With a highly competitive grant from the U.S. State Department, Southwest will soon embark on a six-week exchange with Vietnam's two premier music institutions.

Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime foreign correspondent, is trying to think of a good title for a planned memoir. One candidate: "Interesting Times." "You know what the Chinese curse is? 'May you live in interesting times,' " he says. Interesting times: covering the war in Vietnam, from the first Americans killed, in 1959; traveling to China for President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 visit; Karnow's friendship with Corazon Aquino, who in the 1980s became president of the Philippines and a global heroine.

When a small Canadian environmental firm started collecting soil samples on a former U.S. air base in a remote Vietnamese valley, Thomas Boivin and other scientists were skeptical that they would find evidence proving herbicides used there by the American military decades ago still posed a health threat. But results showed that levels of the cancer-causing poison dioxin were far greater than guidelines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for residential areas. That's when Boivin, now president of the firm, says he had his "eureka moment."

William Tuohy, a former longtime Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War, has died. He was 83. Tuohy died Thursday morning after open heart surgery at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, said Adam Wheeler, Tuohy's stepson. During his 29 years at The Times, Tuohy served as bureau chief in Saigon, Beirut, Rome, Bonn and London. In that time, he covered wars and conflicts not only in Southeast Asia but the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Iran and the Falkland Islands, among other places.

Abdalla Ali thinks he might have been born during the rainy season. He is pretty sure the year was 1984, but he doesn't know which month. Ali grew up not knowing his age or tracking his birthday. But each year in San Diego, where he now lives with his wife, siblings and dozens of other Somali Bantus, Ali and his fellow refugees celebrate together. They all share the same birthday: New Year's Day. Of the nearly 80,000 refugees resettled in the United States this year, almost 11,000 have been given Jan. 1 birthdays, according to the State Department.

Col. Robert L. Howard, one of the most decorated soldiers in the Vietnam War and a Medal of Honor recipient, has died. He was 70. Howard died Wednesday of pancreatic cancer at a hospice in Waco, Texas, said his son-in-law, Frank Gentsch. "He was a soldier's soldier," Gentsch said. "He loved his family, especially his grandchildren, but he was very much his whole career about taking care of soldiers." Howard, who was wounded 14 times in Vietnam and awarded eight Purple Hearts, was nominated three times for the Medal of Honor, the most prestigious award for U.S. combat veterans.

There is a perennial danger in imagining that one war will replicate the history of another. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sent troops to Iraq and foresaw that they would be greeted as liberators, in a happy reenactment of American soldiers entering Paris beneath fluttering rose petals; six years and more than 4,300 American fatalities later, their promises have been bitterly repudiated and America still struggles to extricate itself from that reckless...

The Vietnam War A Graphic History Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Wayne Vansant Foreword by Gen. Chuck Horner, USAF (Ret.) Hill and Wang: 144 pp., $19.95

Re "The Vietnam questions, today," Opinion, Nov. 12 Gordon Goldstein cited George Ball's prescience in warning against escalation of the Vietnam War, a position for which he was once chided. "What you know about Vietnam," a critic told him, "could be comfortably contained in a fairly small thimble." Conceding that point, Ball made a larger one by challenging the metaphor -- asserting that his knowledge of Vietnam was even shallower than intimated but wider, more politically intuitive and best contained on a "soup plate."