I value guest columnist John Berkowitz as a contributor who genuinely wants peace; and, so, I looked up authors whom he cites as informing his views on Ukraine and Russia [“Past time to end wars in Ukraine, Palestine,” Gazette, Aug. 9]. These writers had clearly cogitated, and had some things to say.

Among their number is a sometime Harvard wunderkind named Jeffrey Sachs, whose initiatives I saw being implemented at the (supposed) end of the Cold War. Jeffrey Sachs was advising Poland and, through Yegor Gaidar, Russia, on how to transform their socialist economic systems into market-based economic systems. Jeffrey Sachs’ recommendations on how to achieve this shift were extremely painful for both Poland and Russia. Poland eventually said “thank you” to Jeffrey Sachs; however my own guess is we may thank Jeffrey Sachs for the authoritarian character of the Polish government today.

In Russia, after the Cold War (supposedly) ended they suffered an economic collapse on the order of our own Great Depression of the 1930s. I do not know that there was a great deal of interest in our country to help Russia in that time of their great distress. What got Russians through the economic collapse were safety net measures that had been established under Premier Brezhnev.

In being, myself, quite old now, my childhood included watching nightly newscasts showing rescues of wounded American soldiers in Vietnam. I heard daily counts of Vietcong casualties on the Bob Steele show on my way to school in the morning. I was a child, but could say to myself how easy it would be to “cook” those numbers of fallen enemy soldiers. Years later, Charlie Clements confirmed those numbers were, indeed, cooked in his book, “Witness to War.”

I was a child, but I questioned if all the anti-Vietnam War mobilization would suffice to make that war end. In fact, the mobilization did compel a closure to that Vietnam War; but then, in 1991, we had what was billed as a “good war” that, it was hoped, would banish residual national nightmares from our Vietnam experience.

Seymour Hersh’s book, “The Dark Side of Camelot,” suggests avenues of exploration responsible people should consider.

Mary Hall

South Hadley