Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.

Maimed but still magnificent... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral.

A first hint of the power of the electronic media to bring disaster directly into living rooms came with the radio broadcast of the explosion of the zeppelin "Hindenburg," in 1937 . . .

Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it.

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.