Vietnam.
Ten years have passed since the North Vietnamese T-54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace. Ten years since the last eleven marines climbed into a CH-53 helicopter on the roof of the United States Embassy and flew away from the ruined country, while thousands of compromised Vietnamese pleaded in vain for evacuation and thousands of others took to the sea. Ten years since the end of the war.
Across those ten years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting it. Vietnam belonged to the parents, lovers, wives, and children of the 58,022 dead, to the maimed men hidden away in veterans’ hospitals, to the bearded young man you would see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth. Vietnam? That was in another country, man, and besides, the wench was dead.
There was no large-scale congressional inquiry into the war, no major attempt to divine its bitter lessons. We had the assorted felonies of Watergate to entertain us, the injured economy to distract us, the Iranian hostage crisis to infuriate us. The war had shaken American society to its core, eroding authority, splitting families, setting generation against generation, forcing citizens to define basic beliefs.
During the war, thousands of draft-age Americans refused to serve in the armed forces, and left in unprecedented numbers for exile in Canada or Sweden, some never to return. Demonstrations grew in sound and fury, at first exuberant, then bitter, as protests increasingly ended with tear gas, mass arrests, violence, even death. Four were killed at Kent State in 1970 as Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. Two died at Jackson State. There were others, their brains scrambled on acid, ruined with speed. Kids toppled over in crowded fields as the chants rose: Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today? Some walked off rooftops in the Haight or on the Lower East Side, while others chanted, Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, the N.L.R is gonna win. The roads of America in those years seemed crowded with the young — guitar armies in advance and retreat, all of them hating the war, some of them hating America. And when they paused, stopped, turned down the volume on the Stones or the Dead, and looked at the news, they could see veterans home from ‘Nam, bearded and wild, unlike the neat, proud, dusty members of the American Legion, and they were hurling their medals over the White House fence. They could see body bags arriving at military airports. They could see the war going on and on and on.
But when it was over at last, it seemed like some peculiar television series that had been canceled. Some of us had hoped that defeat would create a healthy national skepticism, a communal refusal ever again to take innocently the sermons of our leaders. We would be a nation of adults, at last, having learned what Europeans had learned long ago: that defeat is the great teacher, that there are limits to power, that slogans are no substitute for thinking.
Ten years later, the anti-Communist sermon is again the dominant factor in our foreign policy. Those little men with the quartz eyes and pink hands who sit in safe Washington buildings are again signing papers that allow young men to go off and kill and die, in Beirut or Grenada or the hills of Nicaragua. The conquest of Grenada, which proved definitively that a nation of 235 million could overwhelm a country of 110,000, was greeted as a famous victory. The president was hailed as a firm leader, and medals dropped from the Pentagon like snow. Less than ten years after the end of the longest, most disastrous war in American history, we seemed to have learned nothing. Nothing at all.
Yet Vietnam will not go away. On the evening news, ten years later, we see General Westmoreland trying in a courtroom to win from CBS the victory that he could never wrest from General Giap. We see tearful ceremonies in the rain beside a generation’s wailing wall in Washington as those who lived through Vietnam come together to mourn those who did not. Occasionally we hear politicians, from President Reagan down, speaking of the war in the oratory of a Fourth of July picnic, attempting with porous language to transform disaster into victory, stupidity into wisdom, folly into glory.
But more than 2.6 million Americans passed through Vietnam, and they will carry with them until they die the psychic shrapnel of their time in that place. The names of the places are like beads in a bitter rosary: Khe Sanh, Pleiku, Ap Bac, Cam Ne, Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Hue, Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhut, the Iron Triangle, the Mekong, and a thousand others that evoke rain, helicopters, blasted trees, snake-colored rivers, the green watery light of forests, and the death of friends. They spoke a language that is now forgotten: incoming, L.Z., capping, medevac, Chinook, tree line, punji stick, spider hole, jolly green giant, trip wire, claymore, Huey, klick, body bag, pogue, Charlie, fragging, COSVN, in country, payback, slick, hootch, doo-mommie, gooks and dinks and slopes. These were the nouns of the war; the verbs didn’t matter, or the tenses; war is always present tense for the men who fight it, and combat is illiterate.
There were other nouns, of course, common and proper, all now abandoned and rusting like old weapons. Does anyone remember the face of Ngo Dinh Diem, plucked from a Maryknoll retreat in New Jersey in 1954 to become president of the South Vietnam he had not seen in years? Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a conservative mandarin in a region seething with revolution. Yet the Americans thought he would do just fine. After all, he had been promoted and recommended by Cardinal Spellman, hustled from office to office in Washington to meet the few men in America who knew anything at all about Vietnam. For a while he served Washington’s interests well, refusing to honor the Geneva agreements by taking part in the 1956 elections, which would have unified Vietnam. The reason was simple: in a free election, Ho Chi Minh would have won. And in an American election year, neither John Foster Dulles nor Dwight Eisenhower was prepared to let a Communist come to power in a free election. So Diem built his army, expanded his corps of American advisers, took his American millions. The Communists went back to the hills.
But Diem was remote and mystical. The regime was soon controlled by Diem’s sinister brother, Nhu, a corrupt drug addict, and Diem’s snarling sister-in-law, Madame Nhu. Non-Communist opponents were killed or jailed; puritanical laws were clamped on the population; the South Vietnamese Army — the ARVN — was wormy with thievery and paranoia. And in the early sixties the Vietcong began to fight, and to win. By the time Diem and Nhu were assassinated in a coup on November 1, 1963, and Madame Nhu had departed for exile, the war was almost lost. The Americans came piling in like the cavalry riding to the rescue. Right into the quagmire.
Diem and Nhu and the Dragon Lady are forgotten now, their faces blurred by time. Forgotten too is all the optimistic gush that rolled out of the typewriters of Saigon flacks, the nonsense about strategic hamlets, electronic fences, Special Forces A-Teams, the C.I.D.G., the winning of hearts and minds — all those lights at the end of all those tunnels. A billion words must have issued from the collective mouths of official spokesmen; the men in the black pajamas, however, kept coming down those trails to fight. Who now remembers the hundreds of thousands of words that dropped from the lips of Sir Robert Thompson, who periodically retailed his wisdom to the gullible Americans? He had had a part in the British victory over the Malayan insurgents; that made him an expert. So the Americans listened, while Thompson declared himself a clear-and-hold man rather than a search-and-destroy man, and none of it mattered, because neither strategy worked. In offices in Washington and Saigon, the slick charts looked persuasive; on the field of battle, the Communists were absorbing the most horrendous punishment, and winning.