Last July 4 when the SyFy Channel was having its Twilight Zone marathon, I recorded a number of episodes, so many that I still haven't watched them all. And now it's almost July 4 again. I don't think I'll record any this year, though I do enjoy most of them. Last night we watched one called In Praise of Pip.To my great surprise, it opened with a scene in a field hospital in Vietnam.
The surprise came from the fact that I had thought The Twilight Zone had ended no later than 1962, and I didn't think the war was prominent enough in the life of the country to be mentioned in a TV show at that time. And not only mentioned, but questioned: the war scene is only an incidental part of the story, used to establish that one of the characters is dying, but there are a couple of remarks that express some doubt about its purpose.
Investigation reveals that I was wrong about when the show ended–it was 1963, not 1962, and this episode aired in September of '63. (Here's its Wikipedia entry.)People of a certain age will immediately note that this was just a couple of months before the assassination of JFK.
I suppose it's just a result of the fact that I was only 14, but I wasn't aware that the war was that much in the public eye at that time. Most interesting is the fact that this was still the Kennedy administration. It's an article of faith among a lot of Democrats that Kennedy would have ended the Vietnam war, but this is a reminder that he didn't seem to be moving in that direction at the time of his death.
Light On Dark Water 
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