Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 19, 1991                   TAG: 9103190417
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WELCOMING HOME THE TROOPS

It's as if the nation were issuing a huge sigh of relief, a sigh in which all Americans can partake.

Relief that the weeks that stretched into months of encampment in the desert sands did not stretch further. Relief that U.S. casualties were so mercifully light. Relief that at last America fought - and won - a battle against a foe who was unambiguously the bad guy, in a campaign as stunning in its prosecution as it was in its success.

Perhaps the homecomings also can occasion a new American maturity.

One test of such maturity is whether we are able to pause during the celebrations to consider the tens of thousands of enemy soldiers, also victims in a way of Saddam Hussein's ruthlessness, who will not be returning to their homes.

Another test is whether our nation can - as President Bush suggested Sunday at a homecoming celebration in Sumter, S.C. - extend similar but belated recognition to veterans of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

If so, then it will be a sign that Americans can make the distinction between assessing the wisdom of policy-makers' war-and-peace decisions and offering the respect owed to those in uniform who are called on to carry out the decisions.

Americans served in Vietnam, too. Their sacrifices were great; their reception back home was not.

Troops in Vietnam were rotated in and out, typically for one-year tours, which meant there was little opportunity for mass homecomings. But Americans could have shown their respect in other ways, and didn't.

Indeed, many allowed their disgust at the policies of Presidents Johnson and Nixon to manifest itself in disdain, even scorn, for those - often draftees, often from the bottom rungs of the economic ladder - ordered into combat by civilian authority.

Today, there is a mirror-image danger. It is that the joyous celebration of troop homecomings will derive too much from the fact that the operation worked so well militarily, and too little from appreciation for the sacrifices of American men and women called into battle.

Not all operations work, or will work, so well; many have been, and perhaps will be, less morally and practically defensible. For that matter, the full consequences of the Gulf War have yet to be played out; it remains possible that even this war eventually will seem less a complete success than it appears today.

That the vast majority of American men and women in the gulf are returning safely home is cause for joy, and their service cause for gratitude. Simultaneously, the president has earned great popularity for his handling of the crisis.

But the two are separate considerations. For when "Support the Troops" is made the same as "Support the Policy," who suffers when the policy fails? Ask those who came back from Vietnam.