War of Words

By Laurence I. Barrett

HOME FROM THE WAR

Viet Nam Veterans:

Neither Victims Nor Executioners by ROBERT JAY LIFTON 478 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychiatry professor who calls himself a "psychohistorian," is a student of holocaust.

His best-known book, Death in Life:

Survivors of Hiroshima, won a National Book Award in 1969. As a onetime Air Force psychiatrist, he often speaks cogently about the high mental cost of war. One therefore expects a great deal of Home from the War.

Lifton was one of a number of psychiatrists who participated in rap groups organized by Viet Nam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). For more than two years he met with a total of three dozen young men. They were not mentally ill but were for the most part in anguish over the roles they had played in a war they despised.

Those passages in which the men speak for themselves often reach directly into the heart of the matter. "If it's dead, it's V.C.," said one man talking of battle casualties and remembering My Lai. "Because ... if it's dead it had to be V.C." Another recalls thinking:

"What am I doing here? We don't take any land. We don't give it back. We just mutilate bodies."

Around such recitals Lifton weaves his own insights. He discusses the myths of war and warriors, the guilt that men feel when they survive their buddies, the absolute necessity to view the enemy as something less than human. But he relentlessly uses his subjects as instruments in an elaborate post-mortem of slaughtered American values and conceits. The veterans speak in salty, evocative American. Lifton, straining for cosmic assertions, clutters his accompanying argument with dense jargon: "creative transmutation of rage," "moral inversion," "general psychohistorical dislocation." His decision to discuss in detail only members of VVAW is a more serious flaw. They are, after all, a very special group of antiwar activists.

The author, moreover, identifies them only with labels--the Marine sergeant, the My Lai survivor--and in most instances little is given of their backgrounds. Despite the sense of suffering that they convey, most of them simply become samples of documentary evidence in a thesis Lifton is pushing.

He wants Americans to acknowledge the war as "an image of ultimate transgression." Redemption, he feels, can come by adopting an attitude of "animating guilt"--a catalyst for transforming destructive old instincts and concepts into constructive new ones. Is such psychic alchemy possible on a national scale? Lifton confesses that he does not know. But he urges that the na tion take his veterans as models.

Many members of the group found that talking about their guilt helped channel their emotions into constructive (that is, antiwar) channels. These young men, Lifton suggests, may per form a "prophetic function" among the general population of benumbed sinners. Perhaps so. As far as this book goes, though, what could have been a strong account of men groping for survival amidst the wreckage that Viet Nam left in their lives becomes instead a polemic in which moralizing smothers analysis. *Laurence I. Barrett

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