The war began gradually, by fits and starts. Peace may come the same way. The agreement laboriously worked out between Washington and Hanoi still faces many pitfalls. A cease-fire should be achieved soon, but the vast complexities of the proposed settlement, President Thieu's resistance, the maneuvering and counter-maneuvering for political control in Viet Nam, the pent-up bitterness and distrust—all these may still mean protracted trouble and even renewed bloodshed. Yet last week Henry Kissinger proclaimed: "Peace is at hand." At long last the U.S. could really count on the end of the conflict. That prospect makes it appropriate for the U.S. once again to assess the terrible cost of its longest, psychically most debilitating war—the cost not only in lost lives and disabled bodies but in the country's troubled conscience, its shaken self-image and its uncertainty over its world role. This is the moment also to look back on what the war meant, and to look ahead to try to perceive what peace will mean. Some of the answers may take years to develop, but in the following pages TIME makes a start.
"We believe that we can restore both peace and unity to America very soon."
WITH those words, Presidential Negotiator Henry Kissinger concluded last week his consummate one-hour briefing on the imminent prospects for a settlement in Viet Nam. After so many false starts and unfulfilled promises for so long, Kissinger's very act of revelation of the secret dealings with Hanoi implied a new U.S. commitment, one that would almost inevitably gain a momentum of its own, much as other commitments have. Probably unconsciously, Kissinger described Washington's determination to resolve the unwinnable, inconclusive and finally intolerable war in terms oddly similar to those in which three Administrations had committed themselves to staying the course. "Having come this far," he said, "we cannot fail, we will not fail."
The hard bargaining was far from over. President Nguyen Van Thieu was resisting the terms of the settlement with all his might—publicly, at least. Hanoi was complaining that the U.S. was trying to slip out of a promise to sign the agreement by Oct. 31, a date that seemed too soon to be realistic. Nor was the fighting yet at an end. Indeed the heaviest ground action in months flared up in Viet Nam as both sides jockeyed for eleventh-hour gains in advance of a cease-fire in place.
But the omens of settlement gathered too. The U.S. restricted its bombing of North Viet Nam to targets below the 20th parallel. South Vietnamese flags were selling at a brisk pace in Saigon, as Vietnamese prepared to show their colors—and protect themselves —in the event of a truce. In Paris, the French government was said to be making quiet preparations to host a new Geneva-style "guarantee conference" of five or six nations that would oversee an orderly cessation of hostilities throughout the scarred Indochina landscape. Inevitably, the accounting would begin of the cost of a decade of war in lives lost and bodies maimed, in homes destroyed and land ravaged, in shattered careers and alienated generations.
Amid all the activity and the building hopes, the answers to the big questions began to solidify, the shape of the long-awaited peace began to emerge.