(3 of 3)
A domestic recovery period need not engender new national egotism. It need not mean the rhapsodic nonsense of The Greening of America, nor the belligerency of the brass-collar Americans. It could instead produce a new sense of reality. What is needed is a civilian DMZ, where the polarized Americans can gather, a place somewhere be tween the moral amnesia of those who would totally forget the war and those who proclaim a perpetual, self-lacerating mea culpa that would take the place of progress. Perhaps this war has bro ken the rules of history. No one can be sure. It can only be observed that in other times, in other wars, the American soul has been marked missing in action, only to return safely home to begin anew.