Back to the Beginning...Our Own Private Vietnam

The following essay was the beginning to all that I think was psychotic in our national discourse. Please make a note in the 'comment' portion of the webblog if you want a list of the works cited in this essay.


"Vietnam made us all a little crazy."
—Former Weather Underground Member Brian Flanagan.



It will not go away.

Raid the trope toy chest to describe America's current relationship to our long-ended war in Vietnam—the wound or scar that won't heal; a terminal cancer; the stain that will not come out; socio-political obsessive-compulsive disorder; an elephant in the room that we've come to recognize; whatever. Twenty-nine years after the fall of Saigon, the images, insecurities and agencies left in that aftermath appear to be irremovable from America's politics, foreign relations, social dynamics, art or media.
It is one thing to admit that you finally see the elephant in the room--still another when the damned thing will not leave, —even when the workmen have cut a wall out to give him room for egress. Yet despite the pleas of American citizens, aged nineteen to ninety, the pachyderm we ignored for twenty-five years during the war (to the price of some 3.2 million lives ) and dismissed for an additional fifteen after conflict's end (to the peril of veterans and citizens of the world) still stands in the middle of the dance floor.
Disagree? Why then did the American media spend two weeks this April making sure their readers and viewers knew the differences between "battle ribbons" and "medals"? Why did hundreds of reporters from around the world spend a large part of their January resembling a mass of sugar-shocked children scrambling under a broken piñata as they scampered across Alabama looking for, of all things, the National Guard dental records of a sitting U.S. President? Why are American pundits and politicians unable to stop asking each other, "What did you do in the war?" What is it about this "police action" in Southeast Asia that we cannot extricate from our dialogue?
Allow me to suggest a brief exercise (it will take you less than a minute) to support my supposition that the agencies of Vietnam are utterly inescapable—Simply "Google" the name of that Iraqi prison—yes, that one—the name of the location of the abuse which has dominated headlines in international media for the last ten days. Add to it the location of the most remembered horror of the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. At this writing, the search for "Abu Ghraib" + "My Lai" garnered more than a thousand hits. Thus, writers reach for a metaphor for evil in combat.
However, this search elicited no mention of Nanking, Dresden or Krakow in this context. The firebombing of Tokyo and the rape rooms of Zagreb don't seem to leap into the interpretive imagination as readily as Lieutenant Calley and his murderous goons do. Arguably, while the images coming from Iraq are abhorrent, there are no photos streaming across CNN and Al Jazeera that depict babies and elderly women at the bottom of a pile of bodies in a ditch at Abu Ghraib. Nevertheless, the anxieties of our national consciousness (as occurs often in the Information Age) infiltrate narratives of events both here and abroad.
Vietnam is our shorthand and American or foreign writers don't even blink in using it, despite the possibility that the connection is apochryphal. This essay attempts to plumb the depths of national and international hysterias that not only separate the Vietnam Conflict from its historical predecessors, but also do not permit that war's separation from any conflict that follows it. In fact, I offer the notion that this cognitive dissonance interferes with the aforementioned cultural constructions that are far removed from the study of mere history.

* * *

Some blame denial for this inability to put Vietnam behind us. They claim that Americans are still actually pretending Jumbo is not standing in the midst of the dance floor (despite the fact that we wanted to boogie a long, long time ago and still cannot step out). This is to say that writers and readers are still ignoring the "realities" of history that Vietnam provides. Logically, the easiest tack in the pursuit of a palatable Vietnam exegesis would be historical in nature. However, it is likely that effective historical analysis with only thirty years between today and the end of the war is a hazardous exercise. In The World, the Text and the Critic, Edward Said poses the notion that the texts of a "conquering" nation cannot successfully be removed from the boundaries erected by their own agencies (56), and this hypothesis could easily be applied to historical views.
In elaboration of that idea, even outside of literary theory, some historians and journalists have posed the idea much of the historicized material concerning the Vietnam War is subject to the political motivations of specific organizations and interest groups. Tom Vallely, Founding Director of Harvard's Institute for International Development's Vietnam Program refers to contemporary writers like Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam as "industry writers." It is this 'industry' of Vietnam writing, unable to release itself from the anxieties and agencies of those too close to the war's questions, that "tries to regulate the debate," Valelly told a group of students at a 25 April lecture before the Kennedy School of Government, "We still live surrounded by falsehood, much of it our own invention." Again, the messengers are still too close to the subject to get away from message.
Is this primacy to the issues to the Vietnam War necessarily a negative thing? Certainly, if Barthes can distill an effective hypothesis from soap commercials (and still wear clean clothes), a liberal or conservative culture can divine historical clues in the face of these inherent social aporias of Vietnam. If this is possible, we encounter several theories concerning the errors of Vietnam that dominate discourse. One is the possibility of our society's indulgence in a citizen-based fallacy that still reflects the errors and hubris of 1945 through 1975. In her book, The March of Folly, popular historian Barbara Tuchman envisions the fallacies as twofold and as old as the Trojan War: a refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence at hand (i.e. 900 years of a land war in Indonesia had never garnered a victory for the invaders); and an "addiction to making decisions that were counterproductive to American Society [at large]" (234-5).
There is more than a little touch of library armchair psychology visible in the conclusions of Tuchman, a pervasive sense of cognitive dissonance and hysteria presiding over descriptions of events and decisions. Note the use of language: "repetition despite the lack of changing results"--the definition of insanity and the word "addiction." This would seem to apply to my notion of the Vietnam War as agent of cultural confusion. The signifiers of the insane used to illuminate insanity.
Other theorists like Elaine Scarry seek more mechanical links to political psychosis and the errors of Vietnam. In her essay "Citizenship in Emergency," Scarry offers an answer to the why's of the war with a very Information Age twist. It is the U.S. Government's need to address crises at a significant "rate of speed" (for Scarry, a result of nuclear realities) that has lead to fatal mistakes. She writes, "'Speed' has occupied the foreground not only of our descriptive statements about our national defense but also our normative statements" (224, emphasis is Scarry's). Seemingly, text alone can be invoked to sidestep constitutional or ethical objections to policy.
However, all of these deconstructions of policy, whatever their flaws, do not address this essay's central mystery—the inexorable impossibility to remove the language of ethical superiority from national and international discourse. There is more to say of history, but first a glimpse at the possible illuminations of art.

* * *

Certainly, a light in the psychic fog of history might be found in the novels and literature of the Vietnam era. Homer and Shakespeare wrote of the humanity in combat, Crane and Trumbo of its frailty, Heller and Vonnegut of its folly. Perhaps the literature of the Vietnam Generation can effectively coalesce into a better understanding of these manifestations of the anxieties described here. Potentially, fiction of the era could better investigate the ethical crises that would give momentum to the anxieties that drive Vietnam War-laden discourse.
For example, in his essay, "A Rumor of War: Another Look at the Observation Post in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato," poses the thesis that the concept of courage is the primary thematic construction of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, in that protagonist Paul Berlin must "face up to, if not overcome, his repeated cowardice" (81). In addition, Slay writes that the courage struggle also represents the fallacious center of the novel. Thus we could venture that the novel provides that the cultural dissonance that this essay questions stems not from a lack of imagination but from a lack of moral bravery. It is undeniable that the fantastic element of Cacciato (the considerable bulk of O'Brien's novel) addresses the question of moral certainty in a Vietnam context, but Slay's suppositions do not effectively address the concerns of this essay. It is flawed to address this question of a national gestalt of aporia through the prism of a colonialist virtue.
Instead, it is the clash of generational and cultural value systems that Cacciato might offer a clue to our central mystery. On their "journey" to Paris, the soldiers of the novel encounter a series of Warrior Codes—a more complex series of ethical signifiers than simple courage. Lieutenant Corson, new LT for Berlin's Third Squad, is a paragon of Korean War/World War II ethos: a series of codes repeatedly noted to be missing from the Vietnam Theater. "In Korea, by God, the people liked us. Know what I mean? They liked us. Respect, that's what it was. And it was a decent war," Corson drunkenly tells an Indian hotel owner, "That's the difference. In Nam there's no respect for nothing. No heart...What happened? What went wrong?" (150). The absence of the rules of engagement embraced by his country equals a loss of moral authority for Corson. Thus in turn, inverting the moral authority of command in the Vietnam War.
Later in the novel, Iranian Savak officer Fahyi Rhallon harkens O'Brien's story to an even older set of Warrior Codes—the poetic. His version of a 'good war story' is described simply as "one about a battle in the snow and how the snow looked afterward" (203). Rhallon's 'story' is an evocation of Aristotelian poetics and their relationship to martial narratives. The squad's response is noise and vulgar, drunken storytelling of their own. Again, O'Brien illuminates the relationship between the 'Old Warrior' narrative and its creation of moral certainty and the subsequent destruction of them by the ambiguities of the Vietnam Era.
In the end, the titular Cacciato may be the least complex voice of changing moral discourse in the novel. Cacciato acts as a possible agent of moral clarity, the force that urges Berlin's squad to "Gay Paree," and away from the ethical dilemmas of the Southeast Asian rains. However, Cacciato's 'quitting' the war has no explanation, no discourse to illuminate the moral path. He is elusive and ridiculously reduced to a deux ex machina in the Tehran jailbreak.
While perhaps there are glimpses of answers in O'Brien's text, a glimmer of understanding the remarkable staying power of the Vietnam War in national discourse, the search cannot stop here. Without a doubt, a narrative that solely focuses on the American GI in Vietnam omits the bulk of the population from having an influence on these anxieties.
Bobbie Ann Mason's novel, In Country, offers a glimpse of the war's aftermath in North America. The protagonist's attempts to understand events and products of Vietnam solely within American contexts are central to the novel. Sam, a teenager surrounded by local Vietnam veterans in rural Kentucky, strives to learn more of the war and of her father, who died there. In "Oppositions in In Country," Timothy D. O'Brien poses the notion that Sam (read, "Uncle Sam" or the American civilian) is a nexus of gender/social issues that civilians back home attempted to grapple with the moral uncertainties of the conflict "rejecting the [horrific] version of her father that she finds in his war diaries" (178), yet sympathetic to the local veterans. Here we find the same disconnect one found in the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] motto "Support the Troops—Bring Them Home." Most importantly, as the novel progresses, Sam tries to better comprehend these contradictions through television programs, music videos and Beatles lyrics. Attempting to render aid to a PTSD-suffering veteran, she tries to evoke a Vietnam memory from him "as dramatic as that one that caused Hawkeye to crack up in the final episode of M*A*S*H. But nothing came" (648). Within Mason's narrative strategy we find a link between popular culture and the anxieties of the Vietnam Era.
How then can we link Mason and O'Brien's novels (among many other novels, poems and short stories), both published more than twenty years ago, to 2004's evocations of John Kerry's war record and My Lai? It the persistence of these anxieties and their subsequent coping mechanisms that I hoped to investigate, yet all an analysis of these novels has served to do is recognize a few of the strategies this gestalt employs in discourse. The absence of moral certainty is clearly a product of the conflict and thus a viable villain in our national hysteria. However, the mystery of what separates this era from other cultures or historical eras in our national conversation still eludes this investigation.

* * *

In his heavily documented 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara writes in his preface,
"I...know that the war caused terrible damage to America. No doubt exists in my mind about that. None... We of the Kennedy and Johnson administration who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why (i-iii).

Seemingly, the mathematical mastermind of the Vietnam Escalation reaches for closure and an understanding in simple language, an attempt is made to close the door of hysteria.

But the door will not close. On the week of the book's publication, McNamara was the featured speaker at the Kennedy School of Government lecture mentioned earlier in this essay. Contrite, sometimes disheveled, he still presented a meticulous fourteen-point assessment of the failures of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations policy in Southeast Asia. After the remarks of historians (including Valelly), McNamara steps up for a Q&A and any semblance of academic sterility goes out the window. The first question concerns My Lai and the former Secretary's answer refers to Hiroshima and the firebombing of Japan. The second questioner, a Vietnam Veteran, almost forgets to include a question in his list of dead buddies. The moderator has lost complete control of the session and McNamara does his best to placate the questioner.

The next exchange , which I condense here, has the subtlety and impact of a brick.
QUESTION: Mr. McNamara, you don't know who I am but you certainly-- from my entire-- you poised a situation which created the rest of my adult life. My name is Maureen Dunn. I don't know if you remember the incident of February 14th, 1968, the China incident, where you, the President, the Vice President, Secretary Clifford, General Wheeler, General Taylor, Secretary McNamara, George Christenson, Secretary Rusk, Tom Johnson and Walt ... (inaudible) met for 30 minutes about the China incident. Do you remember that?
MCNAMARA: I'm sorry, I don't
DUNN: Okay, well, the thing is you on page six of a top secret document that I received in 1992, his people were served when he was first shot down, and six and a half hours was heard for 20 to 70 minutes. And you people sat there in that room for 45 minutes never addressing his name. He was always "The China Incident." He was 25 years old. So, you never had a face to see, or to know that he had a 25 year old wife and a baby, a one year old baby. This is very emotional for me. I didn't think I would be. But, I'm that guy's wife. And you said on page 6, "No rescue attempt should be made. Don't go after him. It's not worth it." And all these years, Mr. McNamara, I wanted someone from those ten people who were at that meeting to say to me, "I am sorry." And I'd like you to say that in front of all these people to me, "I am sorry." I just want you to say, "I am sorry." (applause)
MCNAMARA: I have no recollection of the meeting and I can't--
DUNN: It's right here.
MCNAMARA: I haven't seen it and I'd like to see it. But, let me just say this. If I said it, I'm not sorry, I'm horrified. I'm absolutely--
DUNN: Say, "I'm sorry, Maureen."
MCNAMARA: Well, I'll say I'm sorry but that's not enough. I am absolutely horrified (Online).

The door will not close.

* * *

Then, what to make of the above conversation, this refusal of the language of reconciliation? While veterans of both sides of the Vietnam War use the speech of closure, our nation at large cannot. Vietnam becomes political football, subject of misanthropic hip-hop artists and textual shorthand for American cruelty.

I write this as the son of a member of SDS* and the stepson of a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War. I come from a household that rarely speaks of the war and never speaks of it in any detail. Both parents agree that the Vietnam War was a terrible, terrible thing, but their experiences hold little for them to share with one another. My mother still tastes the bitter tear gas of Denver policemen and feels the salve of moral authority. My stepfather remembers how the local Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge would not admit a Vietnam Veteran—subjecting him to an indignity of semantics, the organization would not admit those who served in a "police action." The only thread that ties these experiences is that every American hated the war, but in that hatred found no cleansing redemption. Hating the Vietnam War quickly became an insane ballet of self-loathing. The hysteria of our current dialogue is a logical result of this dance.
Historians battle their own political agencies. Authors try to decipher our collective subconscious in the harsh light of Vietnam.

And in the meantime, it will not go away.


*-I have since found that this reference was apochryphal. I apologize for the error.
-mls
Again, if you would like a list of the works cited in this essay, please click on the 'comment' portion of this 'blog and leave an available email address. It will be sent to you ASAP.--M