From the issue dated July 9, 2004
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The Ghosts of War
For three decades American leaders have tried to bury memories of the Vietnam War only to have them pop up again like indestructible poltergeists. In 1991, for example, a few days after the Persian Gulf War came to its apparent end, President George H.W. Bush declared a double victory. Not only had the United States driven Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, he trumpeted, but we had also managed to vanquish the ghostly memories of a war that was lost a generation earlier on the other side of the planet. "The specter of Vietnam has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula," the president said. Those words sound even more foolish today than they did in 1991, in part because our invasion and occupation of Iraq has generated so many comparisons to the Vietnam War. The echoes of that long-ago war reverberate around every discussion of the false pretexts for the war in Iraq, every official claim of American "progress," every analysis of "winning hearts and minds" or of "nation building," and every incident of American violence and abuse against the very people we claim to be saving. And now with the formation of an Iraqi government claiming to be "sovereign," we are confronted with a question that haunted U.S. intervention in Vietnam from the very beginning -- namely, can any American-backed government ever gain political legitimacy among its own people? It is simply ludicrous to suggest that the memories of any war can be buried, least of all by waging further wars. As le thi diem thúy writes in The Gangster We Are All Looking For (Knopf, 2003), her wonderful novel about Vietnamese refugees who fled their country in 1978 and eventually made it to San Diego, "War has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song." Isn't it odd how little our presidents have actually said about the Vietnam War since those last American choppers flew out to sea in 1975? Part of the silence reflects how divided we remain over the war and thus how unable anyone is to deliver a coherent, nationally agreed-upon narrative about its history and significance. For several generations, most students have picked up a muddle of vague and incoherent messages from Washington that boil down to this: We should honor American veterans who fought a tough, divisive war and never received the support and respect they deserved; we should put the war behind us and move on with pride and patriotism; and, whatever mistakes we made in Vietnam, they should be avoided in the future. Those injunctions raise any number of nagging questions. How, for example, do you combine honor and pride with avoidance and forgetfulness? Of course, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr. did make enough specific statements to fuel right-wing claims that America failed in Vietnam because our soldiers were "denied permission to win" (Reagan) or fought "with one hand tied behind their backs" (Bush Sr.). They further suggested, often with coded indirection, that antiwar protesters, a weak-kneed liberal Congress, and near-treasonous media had betrayed our nation and its soldiers. For those presidents, and even more so for the current Bush administration, the central lesson of the Vietnam War was not that U.S. military power should be exercised with greater restraint and more democratic accountability, but that our global pre-eminence had been unduly shackled by a "Vietnam syndrome" of liberal timidity and national self-loathing that could be overcome only by an ever-smaller coterie of bold war managers operating beyond the scrutiny and control of the public. For his part, President Bill Clinton largely squandered an eight-year opportunity to present a persuasive counter to the Reagan-Bush view of the Vietnam War, perhaps out of defensiveness over his evasion of the Vietnam-era draft. As a result, we have still not heard our highest elected official make even so moderate a statement as the following: For two decades the United States tried to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. We failed for many reasons, but mostly because the non-Communist government we supported never had the widespread support of its own people and because our military policies, which included the dropping of more bombs than have ever been dropped on any country and the ultimate killing of at least two million Vietnamese, only served to stiffen opposition to our intervention. Now the present war has begun to expand our public memory of the Vietnam War, perhaps especially among the young. In a New York Times op-ed on May 23, Joshua Foer, a Yale senior, wrote: "For my generation, abuse of power meant sexual indiscretions in the Oval Office -- not shifting rationales for war." In the last year, however, Foer said that he has observed a marked change among his classmates. "We've been forced to relearn the lessons of our parents' generation, and it has been a deeply disillusioning experience." A year ago 65 percent of college students supported the war in Iraq. By April, Foer noted, it was down to 49 percent. The chief usefulness of Vietnam War memory to the current crisis is not to insist that the two cases are exactly analogous. We're comparing an increasingly beleaguered and violent occupation of Iraq after the speedy overthrow of a despised dictator to a protracted war against a nationwide Communist movement led by the widely revered Ho Chi Minh (who received substantial support from China and the Soviet Union). So far at least, the anti-American resistance in Iraq lacks the coherence, arms, and large-scale external support that belonged to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. That said, there are real and important similarities that can illuminate our evaluations of current American policy. In fact, Iraq in some ways seems like the Vietnam War in hyperspeed. Take, for instance, the idea of a "credibility gap." That phrase first entered American political vernacular in 1965, introduced by David Wise, a journalist, in reference to the gulf between President Lyndon Johnson's claim that American military escalation in Vietnam was limited and defensive and an emerging public perception that it was, in fact, massive and aggressive. Yet it took years before vast numbers of Americans believed their top officials had justified and conducted the Vietnam War with a long series of lies and distortions. By contrast, President Bush's pretexts for war in Iraq were widely challenged even before the American invasion, with a global antiwar movement of unprecedented size and diversity filling the streets. And in a little more than a year -- during which there has been no evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, no evidence of a prewar Iraqi link to Al Qaeda, no garlands for American liberators, no major oil-financed reconstruction, and only a promise of Iraqi democracy, the credibility of the White House and the Pentagon has eroded to a point that did not exist during the Vietnam War until at least the aftermath of the 1968 Tet offensive, the nationwide, Communist attack in Vietnam that came after months of American claims that the United States was winning the war. The much faster development of opposition to Bush's war may indicate that his fabrication of a casus belli was even more brazenly hyperbolic and distorted than those of his Vietnam-era predecessors. In any case, it is certainly true that memories of Vietnam-era deceptions, despite every effort to erase or sanitize them, still move many Americans to resist leaders who fail to offer ample and convincing justification for sending soldiers to kill and die. There is also, of course, the concern that Iraq has become a "quagmire" (in which, once again, American troops are charged with routing out snipers, guerrillas, and assassins who are indistinguishable from the civilian population). The quagmire metaphor goes back at least as far as the French Indochina War (1946-54), but only began appearing in assessments of American policy in Vietnam with the 1965 publication of David Halberstam's The Making of a Quagmire. The power of the image lies in its evocation of foreign troops bogged down in a deadly environment in which their every move only serves to mire them more deeply. The metaphor fails to capture the responsibility of U.S. policy makers for creating the conditions that entrap our soldiers and ignores the violence we inflict on the people we claim to be liberating. However, it does convey a sense of how difficult it is to extract ourselves from the mess we've made. Talk of quagmire in Iraq began even before Bush made his Top Gun-style landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln last May and stood in front of a "Mission Accomplished" sign to proclaim an end to major combat. Now that talk is pervasive. Through it all, the Bush administration has rejected every Vietnam analogy, refusing even to use the word "guerrilla" -- never mind "quagmire" -- for fear of conjuring up a nightmarish history. In the most recent of his rare news conferences, the president insisted that any comparison between our occupation of Iraq and the Vietnam War was not only false but would strengthen the enemy and demoralize our troops. That's why it was so startling to hear Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's comments on May 4 on Larry King Live. When King asked about the photographs showing abuse of detainees by American GI's at Abu Ghraib prison, Powell said: "I'm shocked. I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they're still to be deplored." With that unsolicited reference to the most infamous American atrocity of the Vietnam War, Powell opened the door to yet another, and potentially more damaging, specter from the '60s -- war crimes. The killing of several Iraqi prisoners, and the torture and abuse of others, is not equivalent to the slaughter of 504 Vietnamese civilians. Nor has the military's effort to prevent, or at least delay, the full exposure of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib equaled the My Lai cover-up, which successfully prevented the world from learning of the massacre for 20 months. Yet the prison scandal raises the same important questions as My Lai. To wit, how widespread have war crimes been in Iraq, how far up the chain of command does responsibility for them go, and what impact will their revelation have on already dwindling public support for American policy? Then, as now, U.S. officials attributed "un-American" behavior to a few, low-ranking "bad apples" who either lacked proper training or acted in defiance of higher authority. Then, as now, our leaders assured us that the crimes of a few were an isolated aberration from an otherwise just cause. But then, as now, one shocking revelation led to another and undermined the administration's effort to contain the damage. It is too soon to know just how far Abu Ghraib will take us in exposing further American war crimes in Iraq and in deepening home-front opposition to U.S. policy. But it is worth recalling that My Lai marked a turning point in American attitudes toward the Vietnam War almost as significant as the Tet Offensive. Even many who continued to support the war increasingly doubted Washington's ability to prosecute it successfully. And millions who had believed the war a misguided policy or a tragic mistake began to consider the possibility that it was fundamentally unjust and immoral. That response came, in part, because evidence mounted indicating that My Lai was exceptional only in the scale of its unjustified killing. Antiwar veterans like John Kerry soon began to testify that war crimes were an inevitable outcome of such military policies as rewarding units that compiled the highest "body counts"; the creation of "free-fire zones" in which U.S. forces were permitted to kill "anything that moves"; and the burning, napalming, and bombing of Vietnamese villages. Evidence continues to surface even three decades later. In April The Blade, of Toledo, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles documenting a seven-month-long "rampage" in 1967 by the elite "Tiger Force" unit of the 101st Airborne Division that included rape, torture, mutilation, and murder. Presidential candidate Kerry attributes some of his 1971 claims about U.S. war crimes to youthful exaggeration. While politically understandable, Kerry's softened historical assessment of the Vietnam War once again denies another generation of American students the opportunity to hear a major national figure offer an unvarnished critique of U.S. policy. Such a critique would help recover a sense of the full depth and range of Vietnam-era dissent, that there was indeed a time when a great many Americans considered their own leaders criminal. Yet even if Kerry avoids controversial statements about the Vietnam War, his mere presence in the campaign promises to inspire others to air their own candid memories. I hope so, because current debates about Iraq, too often abstract and antiseptic, can only benefit from a more detailed human accounting of war. A quarter-century after the Vietnam War, I spent five years interviewing 350 people on all sides of the conflict. I was continually struck by how visceral the memories of war remain and how important it is to remind ourselves that war produces a countless variety of wounds that do not heal, even years and decades after the shooting stops -- wounds to the body and the soul, to witnesses and survivors, to public trust and every human relationship, to the land itself, and even to the generations that follow. Larry Heinemann, a novelist and Vietnam veteran, told me this: "The war was devastatingly brutal. How do you come out and reconnect with your own humanity? Is it possible to love someone knowing that you have done all these things and have seen all these things? These are the dark things on your heart. I asked a doctor once if there were actually dark places on your heart. He said that when you get a heart attack part of your heart muscle dies. It becomes like a bruise and turns dark. The dark places on my heart are not going away." To put it another way, memories of war cannot be buried in the sands of the Arabian Peninsula or anywhere else; only bodies can. Christian G. Appy, the author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (Viking, 2003), will be a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the fall. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 44, Page B12 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education