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- <text id=89TT1472>
- <title>
- June 05, 1989: American Notes:Veterans
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- June 05, 1989 People Power:Beijing-Moscow
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 49
- American Notes
- VETERANS
- "Our Mutual Tragedy"
- </hdr><body>
- <p> A dozen Soviets landed in Washington last week, but they
- were not mere tourists. Veterans of the Soviet war in
- Afghanistan, they came through an exchange that has also taken
- some 50 American Viet Nam veterans to the Soviet Union. The
- program has achieved profound communions between men who thought
- of themselves as enemies. In Moscow, after a Soviet vet ripped
- open his shirt to reveal a wound caused by a U.S. machine gun,
- a Viet Nam veteran displayed a leg wound inflicted by a
- Soviet-made mine. Suddenly, the strangers sensed, as American
- Larry Oswald put it, that they were "in many ways brothers."
- Said Soviet veteran Sasha Karpenko: "We feel ourselves part of
- those who died in Viet Nam. This is our mutual tragedy."
- </p>
- <p> Last week Danny Reed took Igor Morozov, 23, to the Viet Nam
- Veterans Memorial. They found the name of Reed's friend Ivan
- Smith, killed in 1965. Morozov tenderly ran his fingers over the
- engraved name and left a carnation there. The two veterans
- embraced, then walked away.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-