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AP "In my. vision, when he broke the sixth seal, there was a violent earthquake and the sun went as black as coarse sackcloth; the moon turned red as blood all over, and the stars of the sky fell on the earth like figs dropping from a fig tree when a high wind shakes it; the sky disappeared like a scroll rolling up and all the mountains and islands were shaken from their places. Then all the earthly rulers, the governors and commanders, the rich people and the men of influence, the whole population, slaves and citizens, took to the mountains to hide in caves and. among the rocks. They said to the mountains and the rocks, "fall on, us and hide us away from the One who sits on the throne and from the anger of the Lamb. For the great day of his anger has come, and who can survive it?" "

The Book of Revelations (Apocalyse) 6: 12-17.

The introduction to the The only Americans for whom the Vietnam War was a completed experience, a destiny, were those who died in it-and in them, of course, the experience simultaneously vanished.

For those who survived it, however-and this includes those who saw the experience through at home, via sons or friends or husbands or lovers who were there, or simply through the newspaper and television reportage-it was a war marked finally, and above all, by its incompleteness.

This • is true of all war perhaps, in that whether in victory, defeat or stalematethe experience persists in the survivors and the bereaved: as a memory or a maiming or a nightmare or an absence that continues.

But perhaps no war has been viewed generally by those who were involved with such a high consciousness of its utter inconclusiveness and waste as the abortive Amèrican involvement in Vietnam.

It is in the light of this fact that the structural problems that a number of critics have already commented on with reference to Francis Ford