Day of Mourning

To the Editors:

We should have a national day of mourning, or better our own day of mourning, for the people we have sent into misery, desperation—that we have sent out of life; for our own soldiers, for the pro-American Vietnamese, and for the anti-American Vietnamese, those who have fought with unequaled ferocity, and probably hopeless courage, because they preferred annihilation to the despair of an American conquest.

Robert Lowell

(February 4, 1968)

New York City