The US. After Viet Nam

WHEN the truce came, no one would call it "V-V Day." No crowds would jig through Times Square yelling their relief and pride, exuberantly kissing strangers. Such celebrations, the victory dances of other wars, were in a sense ceremonies of innocence. When the end for Americans came in Viet Nam, the longest and strangest of U.S. wars, innocence would have little to do with it. Something more complex would be occurring in the national psyche: relief, surely, but also bewilderment and chagrin, perhaps a lingering sense of betrayal on both sides of the long domestic debate that would now have to be settled by history.

Too much had happened, too much had changed. The Duke of Wellington once remarked that "a great country cannot wage a little war." Viet Nam. once geographically obscure and utterly remote from almost any American's consciousness, had become, blindly, incredibly, an event almost as important to the nation's culture as its own Civil War. Viet Nam, in fact, grew into a kind of spiritual civil war in the U.S. Thus, even if the physical battle, or at least U.S. participation in it, recedes, its traumatic effect upon the American self-image will persist. The war has gone on so long, has so distorted American life, that in a sense it is difficult to imagine exactly what the nation will become without it. Perhaps, optimistically, the light at the end of the tunnel might now at least give Americans a truer vision of themselves.

In the 13 years since the first American advisers died there, Viet Nam had the time to touch some of the deepest national nerves. It had to be so. A young man now old enough to vote cannot remember a time since he learned to read when it was not there--those malign black headlines of Tonkin and Tet and moratorium, of Khe Sanh and presidential abdication and Chicago. It was, in Critic Michael Aden's phrase, "the living-room war." The evening news on television imaged forth the village ignited with a Zippo lighter, the director of South Viet Nam's police matter-of-factly blowing out a man's brains near the An Quang pagoda, the Buddhists burning themselves to death. In a sense, all Americans became veterans; the war was mainlined electronically straight into the national bloodstream.

Customary proportions of war were skewed, endowed with a wild irony. The greatest military power on earth brought all of its technology--all but the doomsday bombs--to bear on a peasant nation slightly larger than Florida. The smallest war, 9,000 miles from San Diego, became a national obsession that capsized a consensus President and undermined some of the most crucial American institutions--the military, the universities and, more broadly, the framework of authority itself, the sheer believability of Government.

Viet Nam spawned in the American mind a strange combination of tender, outraged sensibilities and deep callousness--an exaggerated sense that everything was wrong and an almost truculent indifference to things that really were dangerously awry. That was a measure of its divisiveness. BRING THE WAR HOME, the radical graffiti said, and sure enough, the Ohio National Guard shot down four Kent State students one spring afternoon as the allies moved into Cambodia.

Norman Mailer, the nation's literary witch doctor, saw cancer there--the rioting cells of some American craziness, a berserk technology seeking and finding the necessary release of violence. Mailer, wrote Mailer in The Armies of the Night, "had come to decide that the center of America might be insane." But was it that? There are two ways to judge it: 1) the war was the metastasis of some deeper American sickness, an expression of institutional evil, or 2) the war was the product of essentially well-meaning miscalculation, an error of judgment and perspective, perhaps, but not a fundamental indictment of the entire society.

Counterpoint. Those two perspectives became the political counterpoint of the '60s. To those who subscribed to the first view, the growing battalions of the radicalized, Viet Nam became a kind of metaphor of evil that justified any excess. If Viet Nam was possible, then anything was possible. The war was a driving psychological wedge that alienated the young and in many ways legitimized a dozen other anti-institutional movements. Some of them would have occurred anyway, no doubt--the campaign for Women's Liberation, for example, the consumer movement, the drive for political reform in the Democratic Party--but it was the climate of war protest that made all the other fragmentations possible.

The war's imprint on American universities is deep and lasting. Faculties became deeply self-conscious and divided about the intellectual's role in American life. Stanford, M.I.T. and other centers of technological training eventually more or less forsook secret research. The war and the deferments students enjoyed from it turned campuses into what Yale President Kingman Brewster described as "purgatorial sanctuaries." With what became an almost automatic fervor, the nation was damned as "imperialistic" and "racist" and "fascist." Students swelled the ranks of conscientious objectors and draft exiles, as well as those who accepted the consequences of a more burdensome conscience and went to jail.

Apocalypse was in the air. The old world was always coming to an end the day after tomorrow. "Do it!" said Jerry Rubin. Abbie Hoffman prankishly scattered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a gesture of his burlesque contempt. More than any other single factor, it was the war that spawned the "counterculture." The undeclared war, in what seemed its extravagant absurdities, appeared such a fundamental violation of the social contract that all bets were off. Illegal drugs achieved a widespread legitimacy. At one critical turning point, the once pacific movement that grew out of the civil rights crusade turned to violence. The explosion of Weatherman's bomb factory on New York City's West Eleventh Street was just another symbol of the war come home.

Privatism. With the ending of the draft and the troop withdrawals, the radical movement waned. Yet for all its profligacy, it accomplished some profound changes in American life. By its theatrical domination of the press and TV, it helped turn a majority of Americans against the war. Probably its most enduring effect will be cultural rather than political--the development of alternative lifestyles, for example. Much of the political energy of the movement was subsumed by the McGovern campaign. But for many months now, with the ending of the draft, the old activism has been dead. In many, a sullen kind of privatism has replaced the formerly furious idealism. In a sense, the war has ended by producing a basically antipolitical generation. Observes Political Scientist Richard Young: "More and more on the campuses, you see a kind of I'm-going-to-get-mine style that's quite different from several years ago. The cynicism is amazing."

The most insidious impact of Viet Nam has been the erosion of trust and confidence in authority. It began at the White House, perhaps in the U.S. complicity in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. The endlessly repeated official optimism about Viet Nam had dangerous consequences. Always, the "corner had been turned," the end was in sight; stick it out a little longer. In 1969 Henry Kissinger told war protesters, "If we have not ended the war by six months from now, you can come back and tear down the White House fence." Writes Anthony Lake, a young Foreign Service officer who resigned in 1970 because of the war: "To be believed is (to some extent) to be trusted. Not to be believed--the present condition Washington often faces before the world and the American people --threatens the character of representative democracy."

Viet Nam dangerously concentrated the nation's power in the presidency, with Congress relegated to a kind of restive passivity. The fault lay not only with the three Presidents who prosecuted the war but with the executive elites with whom they surrounded themselves, hubristic warrior-intellectuals like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert MacNamara. Under Lyndon Johnson, at least, there was an odd blending of machismo styles--the President's "coonskin-on-the-wall" Texas mystique with the cooler but no less assertive air of the intellectuals. This "cando" mentality, it may be, suffused the executive thinking, the very traditional American sense that an impelling will in harness to superior technology can solve any problem. That impulse reckoned without the devastating complexities of Viet Nam, and a culture based on values few in the U.S. understood.

Thus one serious casualty of the war has been the U.S. military itself, the instrument of that will. Abnormal requirements for instant manpower--and the disaffection of so many of the educated young--lowered the services' standards to some extent. Said one senior Army officer: "Calley would never have become an officer if we were not so short-handed." As the war ground on, the protest movement infected the Army itself. "Fragging" became part of the new vocabulary of the '60s. Occasionally units refused orders to go into combat. "Grunts" smoked marijuana openly at their firebases. Thousands came home contaminated with heroin. Race riots broke out among soldiers at places like Danang, even on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.

Surely one of the bitterest, most poignant tolls of the war was taken simply on the 2.7 million Americans who fought there. If the majority of them performed bravely and well--and they did--their sacrifices were somehow tragically diminished by the very ambiguity of the war, its often enraging purposelessness. At its very worst, that frustration produced My Lai and other less celebrated atrocities. The fraternity of Viet Nam veterans faced the additional frustration of returning with neither honor nor glory to the nation they were supposedly "defending." The experience is especially bitter for those thousands who came back maimed or crippled. In one scene of Hogarthian savagery not long ago, television audiences watched a legless vet in a bar near Washington's Walter Reed Hospital blearily drinking beer from his prosthetic calf.

America has endured a transformation, in many ways a radical transformation. In sum, the experience may well amount to a kind of loss of innocence. It demonstrated, for one thing, that American technology does not always work; all the F-111s and "people-sniffers" and laser-guided bombs and helicopters could not ultimately, not really, enforce the American will. Of more psychic importance, the war may have forever soured the almost subconscious, idealized conviction that Americans are somehow morally superior beings. My Lai, the massive bombing campaign, the image of a napalmed child--such things have corroded the American selfesteem. But how deeply?

Yale Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton believes it may amount only to a kind of "psychic numbing," an emotional state encouraged by the Administration. The President still uses the high rhetoric of "peace with honor." Says Lifton: "Nixon has made it very clear that he wants to end the war without coming to terms with it. To learn from Viet Nam the country would have to accept some very painful truths--most notably that it was wrong. The impossible truth for Americans is that we are capable of evil and have committed it on a large scale."

But Americans do not seem in a mood for such catharsis. For one thing, they appear to be weary of self-flagellation. Most would probably be content to turn away and never look back, to let the nightmare fade. Viet Nam, for all the changes it has wrought in the American spirit, remains even today a somehow remote and unreal phantasm. It may be that, as George McGovern seems to be discovering, the nation really harbors little sense of guilt about it, possibly because from the beginning to the very end, Americans have never really understood the war or the Vietnamese or why the whole cruel business ever happened.

Yet at the same time, the nation has been humbled, not only militarily but psychically as well. In some respects that is a healthy thing. It may be eventually a foundation for the U.S. to achieve a reconciliation with itself. The deepest need for healing now lies in a restoration of Americans' faith in their own leaders. Columbia Sociologist Amitai Etzioni finds prospects for that discouraging. "I believe it is too late here," he says. "That mistrust will take a long, long time to correct. It's an illness which has spread too far." Assuming that he is reelected, Richard Nixon's past record of secrecy and comparative executive isolation does not give much reason for encouragement about the next four years. For all of his success in being "presidential" rather than political during this campaign, Nixon has taken a belligerent line on many of the issues about which his countrymen are most divided. Amnesty for Americans who evaded the draft and the war could be a healing gesture after the P.O.W.s come home, but the President feels that to the majority of Americans it probably would be offensive without some compensating provision for national service. Still, it was hardly necessary to call the amnesty idea "the most immoral thing I can think of." In a second term, of course, with the war and its domestic turmoil behind him, Richard Nixon might adopt a more open and generous style, and work harder at his 1968 notion of "bringing us together."

Quite aside from emotional anguish, Viet Nam's legacy to the U.S. includes a massive list of domestic problems long deferred: schools, housing, jobs, public health, environment, all of the social needs that the war superseded. Funds will not necessarily be abundant (see following story). But as much as anything, the sense that such reconstruction is under way might help restore the lost faith in American institutions. In that sense, a feeling of business as usual, of problems being dealt with, might bring back some buoyant normalcy. McGov-crn's campaign phrase strikes the need: "Give us back our country."

For a time, the nation may simply slump into a relieved apathy. Eventually, according to Yale Historian John Morton Blum, there is a danger of dual recriminations over the war--one kind emanating from the militaristic right wing seeking to fix blame for the absence of victory, the other from the left carrying on its crusade against the machinery that it believes led the U.S. into the swamps--the military-industrial complex. The U.S. military may pack up its tanks and choppers and howitzers and APCs and bombs and M-16s and all its young men and sail away, back to "the world." But it may be much longer before America finds peace with itself.

Dead Wrong. Was it all worth it, the deaths, the devastation, the emotional wounds to the nation? Says George Ball, who served as Under Secretary of State in the Johnson years: "It has been a disastrous undertaking from the beginning, and historians will give a bearish verdict to the whole operation. Many men of good will became obsessed with the need for success, but they lost sight of the country's larger interests." To Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., "all we did was show our inability with 500,000 troops and vast technology to cope with a few hundred thousand guerrillas in black pajamas."

All through the '60s, even the stated purpose of U.S. intervention kept changing, from limited counterinsurgency to containment of China in accordance with the domino theory to the argument for South Vietnamese self-determination. Policy at times was dictated by an oversimplified notion of Communist aggression. Says Clark Clifford. Secretary of Defense under L.B.J.: "We misevaluated the situation. We thought the joint Soviet-Chinese effort to Communize Southeast Asia would succeed. We were just dead wrong."

There is at least widespread agreement that apart from the morals of it, the price paid was just too high. But granting that the U.S. was there, a second and more problematic question is whether President Nixon should have withdrawn U.S. forces sometime after he took office in 1969 instead of expending an additional 15,300 American lives and $57.7 billion. The last three and a half years of the war have been, in some sense, an elaborate and bloody face-saving operation for the U.S. The Administration has argued that the effort was necessary in order to redeem the American sacrifices already made and to prevent the hypothetical turmoil that would descend on the U.S. after a "shameful" withdrawal. Such questions may be debated for years. Could Nixon, like De Gaulle in Algeria, have asserted his leadership to declare the issue closed? It is arguable that the new President could have explained that the U.S. had done everything it reasonably could do for Saigon and that the commitment was therefore at an end, that no further lives would be expended to somehow justify the lives already lost.

The argument will go on. No one can claim that the United States won in Viet Nam. What the nation lost it is only beginning to measure.

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