There were many valuable lessons to be learned. For instance, that technology alone cannot beat motivated infantry, a lesson that Iraq is now learning in its war with Iran. Perhaps more important, statesmen should have learned that if there is a chance to end a conflict with a deal, take the deal, no matter how imperfect (Diem turned down a 1962 offer from the Vietcong to lay down arms and join a coalition government; the Americans turned down a similar deal the following year). Our leaders should have learned to avoid, if possible, taking sides in a civil war; any city cop will tell you that he would rather face a professional murderer than intervene in a domestic dispute. We should have learned that a great nation must never enter a war unless the goals are absolutely clear, and agreed upon by a majority of citizens; then you formally declare war, instead of sliding into it a foot at a time.
Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force. Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, and must be understood and respected. We should have learned that in a democracy such as ours, lying is fatal, whether to the press or to the people or to ourselves. We should have learned that we can’t ever talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right-wing military dictatorship. As citizens, we should have learned never again to place our trust in princes, or in abstraction, and never to entrust the war-making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.
Above all, Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they must study its history. In Vietnam, the Americans were deep into the swamp before they started reading Joseph Buttinger, Bernard Fall, the accounts of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China. Discovering these things after the commitment was made led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Lebanon and Central America, less than ten years after Vietnam, the old mistakes are general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit.
There is no excuse for this anymore, of course. The literature on Vietnam grows daily, filling the shelves of libraries and bookstores. The complete story of the war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists still have little access to the other side, to the men and women of Vietnam, North and South, who endured so much misery and pain for so many years. Until the Vietnamese war in Cambodia ends, until the United States, with the good grace of a defeated prizefighter, at last offers the hand of friendship to the people who won, we won’t know it all. We don’t even know all of the American part of the tragic tale. We’ll be learning about Vietnam for the rest of our lives.
But the interim texts of the war are there for this generation of politicians, military men, and ordinary citizens to examine, brood upon, and absorb. In the Pentagon Papers, we can see the instinct for bureaucratic self-deception, the presentation of false options, the insistence on illusion in the face of the facts. We can understand the difference between genuine national pride and a self-centered national vanity when we read the memoirs of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. We can experience the fury, pain, and craziness of combat in Michael Herr’s Dispatches, in Mark Baker’s Nam, in Wallace Terry’s Bloods. The works of Frances FitzGerald and Jonathan Schell show with agonizing clarity what the war did to the ordinary Vietnamese, living in those poor villages that got in the way of the juggernaut. From Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers to Joe Klein’s Payback, we’ve had books that explored the shattering effect of the war on the generation that fought it. And there is a huge shelf of books about the way the war changed America itself, all those books about the sixties. All are connected: the multipart PBS series, the Stanley Karnow history, the Time-Life volumes. And the novels: Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, John M. Del Vecchio’s The 13th Valley. The war hangs over all the novels of Ward Just, and it is the offstage presence in Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams. The movies have been less successful — Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and all those films about daring missions to rescue M.I.A.’s still held by the Dirty Commies. Film is almost too literal to capture Vietnam; the truth of the war was internalized, mythic, surrealistic, allusive; its darkest furies, deepest grief, and most brutal injuries could not be photographed. This war belongs to the printed page.
The extraordinary thing is that the men who make the hard decisions in government don’t seem to have read a sentence of the literature, or to have applied the lessons to the present world. The tangled, hurting history of Nicaragua is there to be discovered, its culture and myths can be examined; but policy is still determined on the basis of the old 1950s East-West quarrel. If the hard men in the Kremlin had read carefully the story of the American adventure in Vietnam, they might have paused before blundering murderously into Afghanistan. Those statesmen who refuse to allow the rebels into a coalition government in El Salvador should examine the lost diplomatic opportunities in Vietnam.
Last year, in Nicaragua, I thought a lot about Vietnam. There were no exact analogies, of course, but in the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, I remembered walking through the same kind of lobby in Saigon, talking to correspondents fresh from the fields of battle, exchanging the small talk of war. Late at night, I recalled the faces of soldiers I’d met long ago, marines in the hills and jungles of I Corps, grunts traveling through the treacherous passes around Bong Son.
Talk about Vietnam to old soldiers, meet an old reporter, and they’ll remember another thing: the beauty of the place. One afternoon, in the lovely hills of Nicaragua, where the contras now roam, I remembered an afternoon near Dalat when a group of us saw a flock of birds, white against the bottle-green hills, move slowly to the north. They looked like doves, and we laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on. It’s difficult to explain to people how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside. Seen from a helicopter, the natural green feminine beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue and brown rain-filled pools had been made by B-52S; those ghastly dead forests, as skeletal as Giacometti figures, were created by Agent Orange. In the night, you could hear hot wind blowing through the trees, as sibilant as Asia, a wind with its own language, its own sound, atonal; that was Vietnam too.
I’m never surprised when I meet once-young men who want to go back. For a day, a month, an hour. They want to see Vietnam when its beauty does not hold the potential of death. They want to know if the con men and hustlers still deal on Lam Son Square. And what about the whore named Ly, whose husband died fighting for the VC, the woman who lived in the blue room and never smiled? Are all those women now graduates of re-education camps? What do they remember about all those clumsy young Americans who arrived to throw seed into flesh before rising to hurl metal at hills and hootches and people? How many Vietnamese listen now to Aretha and the Doors and the Stones? Who lives in Soul Alley, out by Tan Son Nhut, where black soldiers danced to Marvin Gaye, where deserters lived with their Vietnamese women? Have the Communists sealed the tunnels of Cholon? Does anyone live on Hamburger Hill? Who sits by the pool of the Cercle Sportif, or drowses on the veranda of the Continental Hotel, drinking “33” beer? What has become of the old French cemetery in Da Nang, where in 1966 you could see the gravestones sinking into the dark earth? Do children laugh in My Lai 4? The ghosts whisper.