Vietnam as glimpsed from Camelot

When I was about four or five years old, I was sitting with my mother in our car outside the "Neighborhood House" community center in Riverdale in the Bronx, NY when I must have said something about war.

My mother said, "There are no more wars."  Then she thought about it for a moment and added (as I remember it), "well, there's a little war going on right now. It's not a real war."

I tried to picture a "not real" war. The visual backdrop of our lives was the Palisades, a long run of pristine blue flat-topped cliffs across the mile-wide Hudson River, which our apartment overlooked.*  I imagined Indians falling dead along the cliff line, then getting up again, like kids in a game, because it wasn't a real war.

This evening, as I came across the passage below in Stephen Ambrose's Rise to Globalism, I allowed myself to think that that remembered conversation took place in 1963 (it might have been 1964, but never mind):