Only a handful of Americans can remember when M.A.A.G. changed its name to M.A.C.V., or when Chase Manhattan opened its Saigon office, or how many tons of Coca-Cola were unloaded at Cam Ranh Bay. Such details exist in the dusty files of the outfits that managed the war, but they don’t, of course, matter anymore. Other details should. How many remember that the first American killed in Vietnam was Specialist Fourth Class James T. Davis, of Livingston, Tennessee? He died in an ambush on December 22, 1961, just outside Due Hoa, twelve miles from Saigon. The last to die were Marine Corporals Charles McMahon, Jr., twenty-two, of Woburn, Massachusetts, and Darwin Judge, nineteen, of Marshalltown, Iowa. They perished under a North Vietnamese artillery barrage that was laid upon Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29, 1975, the day before the war ended. Their bodies, forgotten in the panic of evacuation, were not brought home until the following March. Their families remember, but almost nobody else in America knows their names. They are as forgotten as the almost 2.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians who died between 1961 and 1975.
Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support. Tours were for a single year, so a man who \ fought through the 1968 Tet offensive would remember one war, a man who was there in 1971 another. Some cooked eggs in mess halls; others waded through muck in the swamps.
All the reporters remember the Five O’Clock Follies, held downtown in the old Rex Theater under the auspices of JUSPAO (Joint United States Public Affairs Office). These daily briefings, held by the men who clerked the war, were usually a bizarre amalgam of kill ratios, body counts, incident counts, weapons recovered. The flacks were neat, clean, invariably crew-cut, and optimism was the order of the day. Occasionally a visiting politician or labor leader would be introduced, after seventy-two hours in the country, to serve up the official line. The message was understood: surely the richest country on earth, the world’s most powerful military machine, would eventually triumph over these badly equipped, badly fed little Orientals. We had technology. We had B-52S and patrol boats and electronic sensors and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and money, endless billions of dollars. Of course we would win. Above all, we would win because we were right. We would roll back the Communist tide.
Out in the field, the grunts who were fighting one of the best-motivated armies in history knew better. The grunts always knew better.
In Saigon, you didn’t see the infantry of either side. The great early cliché of the war was the irony of sitting in the bar on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel, sipping a vodka and tonic, watching artillery light up the night sky only a dozen miles away. Saigon calls up other memories as well, among those who paid rent there long ago: the zigzagging geometries of traffic, the pedicabs, motorbikes, bicycles, and battered cars coughing up filthy blue exhaust fumes; the damp smell of much handled piasters; the bars of Tu Do Street, not much different from those frequented by the French when the street was the rue Catinat (so carefully described by Graham Greene in The Quiet American, that chillingly prophetic novel, which was ignored by the men who made policy). The whores and bar girls were everywhere, citizens of the country of money; you numbah one, he num-bah ten, you like Saigon tea? The old whorehouses of the French epoch were almost all gone by the time the Americans arrived, banished by the puritanical Diem; the old-timers talked with fondness of mirrored walls and ceilings, silky thighs, elegant meals, opium in ivory pipes, mauve dawns.
That was not the American epoch. There were men who loved women in that country, and many who learned to love the country itself, but you. could never love Tu Do Street, the lithe whispering whores in Mimi’s Bar, the women with the enameled faces whose eyes said nothing. They too were casualties of the war, stunned out of feeling, and their sisters could be found all over the country, wherever young Americans were stationed in large numbers. They lived in the half-dark of the bars, where the music of Aretha Franklin and the Doors and the Stones pounded from the jukeboxes, where phrases were dropped, money was exchanged, and men were led upstairs, or into ambushes. The young Vietnamese men, eyes glittery with hatred, watched the Americans parade their purchased ladies along the avenues, where tamarind trees were dying from the exhaust fumes, and sometimes they reached out and slashed an American belly before vanishing into the crowds. Packs of small children roamed too, forcing collisions, slicing at pockets for wallets, flipping watches off the wrists of drunks. In Saigon, the Americans were far from the war, but living in its very heart.
There were some who came to love the very pain of Vietnam, the way lovers surrender to the fierce ache that makes them feel most truly alive. Reporters, spooks, bureaucrats, officers, A.I.D. officials, missionaries — they kept returning, as if convinced that if they made one final desperate attempt Vietnam would love them back. Vietnam never did. Those Americans wanted an affair; most had to settle for a heartless fuck.
There is a widely held theory that television and a free press lost the war. Americans at home, the theory goes, could not bear the sight of all those wounded boys, crying for medics on the far side of the earth, and eventually the people rebelled and told the statesmen to bring the boys home. The truth is that, even in this living-room war, Americans saw a false, sanitized version of the struggle. There were no cameras around to see the soldiers who, after 1970, began shooting up with bachbien, which is what the Vietnamese called heroin; no cameras to show ARVN officers collecting their profits from the filthy trade. Cameras couldn’t transmit the smells of Vietnam: the coppery smell of fresh blood, the farting and gurgling of a mortally wounded boy, the sweet odor of decaying bodies, a week after a firefight, putrefying under the punishing sky. There were sluggish streams in country that gave off the stinking odor of a brown, fetid scum produced by upstream blood. The smells were never to be forgotten. Nor were the sights. In field hospitals you could see young men, only months away from ball fields and Saturday-night dates, their bodies ruptured, full of morphine, skin blistered, legs or arms or eyes gone; they seldom made the seven o’clock news. And the cameras couldn’t capture the terror of a man cut off from his unit, unavoidably left on the field of fire, in the night that belonged to the Vietcong, his body no longer obeying his mind, his words dropping like obscene prayers: oh mama, oh fucking jesus mama, oh jesus fucking christ, oh mama, oh. The cameramen were extraordinarily brave; they saw more combat than any general, more in a day than any of the best and the brightest back in Washington would ever see; but the true televised history of Vietnam was in the outtakes, those moments, that footage, deemed too obscene to be shown to Americans or the rest of the world.
Such details are forgotten now in what passes for public discourse on the war. That is understandable, of course; no nation can dwell forever on pain and defeat. But it remains an astonishing fact that so little was learned from the long, heartbreaking experience.