Given that the black wall has played an important role in how America remembers its war dead, it would be easy to mistake the black wall and the mourning it conjures as a pure expression of the ethics of remembering one’s own. The wall is the centerpiece and symbol of a mass American effort from the 1980s until the present to remember the American dead, a campaign born as a reaction to the civil war in the American soul that was America’s experience of the war, its most divisive since the actual Civil War. This division contributed to the decline in esteem of the American military and its soldiers. Many saw these soldiers as losers who fought in a dirty war that took the lives of innocents, civilians, and freedom fighters, and so it was that throughout the 1970s the war was a difficult subject for many to speak of, including veterans.3 Some of these veterans, inspired, perhaps, by the movements that struggled for civil rights and spoke out against the war, decided that they, too, should speak out for themselves and demand recognition. They led the campaign that created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, its intention to encourage Americans to remember these soldiers as some of their own, rather than as others who evoked only disgrace and humiliation.
Various surgical procedures of memory have healed the wounded reputation of the American soldier. The black wall is the most symbolic — a cut and a wound in the earth, but also a scar and a suture. Politicians and presidents have visited the wall and praised these soldiers. Filmmakers and novelists fought the war again and again in movies and literature, casting these soldiers as the main characters.4 Whether they appeared as heroes or antiheroes, as was often the case, they demanded sympathy and empathy for their virtues and their failures. The rise in compassion for the American soldier among the American public helped to create a resurgence of patriotic feeling, providing solid evidence of how the arts of memory are shaped by the world and shape it in turn. This patriotic feeling has been fundamental to America’s increasingly pugilistic stance since the 1980s, when it began to test its revised, all-volunteer military with small adventures in Grenada and Panama. The early results against vastly outnumbered foes were good, and the American public did not reject these efforts; thus encouraged, the United States struck against Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait. This Gulf War was an application of the lessons that some Americans learned from the earlier war: avoid guerrilla conflict and nation-building; refine American technological superiority; and apply overwhelming force in conventional land, sea, and air battles. With Saddam Hussein’s forces routed in spectacular fashion, President George H. W. Bush could claim: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”5
Presidents and pundits understand the “Vietnam syndrome” to be the fear of failure and the moral revulsion to war that have plagued Americans since their defeat in Vietnam. The shamed American soldier and the antiwar movement were symptomatic of this syndrome. Both had to be treated in postwar operations of memory, where absences became as telling as presences. Present in the black wall are redeemed American soldiers. Absent from the memorial are the casualties who are easier to forget, the veterans who suffer from trauma, or are homeless, or have committed suicide, as the memorial’s most astute critic, Marita Sturken, observes. Collectively, these postwar dead and wounded far outnumber the wartime deaths, but this nation, like other nations, has difficulty acknowledging them and their ills. Nations prefer that wars finish quickly, the wounds cauterized in memory through the conventionally understood “war story” rather than remaining open and infected. One version of the war story is captured in a catchy postwar slogan that might have been written by an advertising firm: Oppose the War but Support the Troops. As the historian Christian Appy notes, the slogan “has often been used as a club to dampen antiwar dissent.”6 The slogan implicitly evokes the memory among many Americans that they did not support their troops during the war in Vietnam and calls on them now to support the troops fighting in current wars. In doing so, the slogan also suppresses troubling questions. Perhaps one could support the troops if one only opposed the war on issues of foreign policy, or if one simply did not agree with the expenditure of American treasure on military adventurism. But if one opposed a war because it killed innocent people, then how could one support the troops who inflicted the damage? Do they not bear moral responsibility for killing? Might they not bear some political responsibility for a war that they implicitly supported through their votes, their attitudes, and their actions? The question of responsibility is particularly pressing for an all-volunteer army versus an army with many draftees, as was the case in Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. judged this draftee army, with its racially diverse soldiers, as one that behaved “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. Would not a volunteer army be even more prone to such a judgment?
The slogan’s refusal to judge soldiers also implies a refusal to judge the civilians. What lies behind the slogan is not only support for the troops but the absolution of the same civilians who utter the slogan. If the hands of the troops are clean, so are the hands of these civilians. As for the American dead, they have not died for nothing after all. This slogan has arisen in their memory, proving once again that the memories the living create of the dead — and the dead themselves — are strategic resources in the campaigns of future wars. Once the dead seemed to cry out against war, but now, just as plausibly, the dead seem to cry out in support of our troops who wage new wars. At least this is what the living say, and it is what the living say that really counts. As the scholar Jan Assman writes, “if ‘We Are What We Remember,’ the truth of memory lies in the identity that it shapes.… If ‘We Are What We Remember,’ we are the stories that we are able to tell about ourselves.”7 The story of supporting the troops affirms an American identity invested in the justice of American wars and the innocence of American intentions. This identity is the true “Vietnam Syndrome,” the selective memory of a country that imagines itself as a perpetual innocent.
Graham Greene both diagnosed and mocked this version of the Vietnam Syndrome in his novel The Quiet American, featuring the sober, idealistic, and almost virginal CIA agent Alden Pyle. In the name of supporting an anticommunist “third force,” he smuggles explosives into the post-French, pre-American Vietnam of the 1950s. Although it is not Pyle’s intention that this third force will kill civilians with these explosives in terrorist bombings, they do. Greene’s point is that both innocence and intention are excuses for the inevitably fatal consequences of American intervention. In this version of the Vietnam Syndrome where America is the dangerous naïf, war is something that Americans love rather than fear, despite any denials to the contrary. How else to explain the many wars that America has fought in its American century? What made Vietnam unique for Americans was that this love was unrequited, the war a tragic affair that ended badly, which Greene signaled in casting the fickle and enigmatic Phuong as Pyle’s lover. Pyle sincerely loves Phuong and wishes to marry her, but his demise, murdered by agents of the Viet Minh, seems not to bother her very much. While the campaigns in Grenada and Panama and the wars in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan have not generated these kinds of romantic allegories, they are efforts by American leadership to rebuild the American people’s love for war. The American soldiers who fought these wars make the emotional connection between past and present conflicts easily enough, or so argues former Marine Anthony Swofford as he describes the Marines preparing for Kuwait: