HOW SHOULD AMERICANS FEEL?

Until a few weeks ago, Americans enjoyed a comforting illusion: the feeling that Viet Nam and all its horrors had somehow gone away for good. To be sure, the shells were still being fired and the countryside wasted, but Vietnamese were now fighting Vietnamese. The memories of a divided America, the alienation of the young, the riots and marches, the massacres and courts-martial--for many, these were still alive and bitter. But the U.S. had finally extricated itself from a war that had traumatized American society for a whole generation.

Then, with stunning suddenness, the war burst upon the U.S. all over again. Hue, Danang, Pleiku, Kontum--hearing the names once more is like suffering a relapse of some virulent disease. It is impossible for Americans to regard the flow of refugees and the anguish of the orphans without pangs of sorrow and even outrage. Every image of a bewildered child, of a weeping mother, makes a claim on the conscience. However disastrous the final results, most Americans once sincerely felt that they were aiding these people. Now one cannot escape the obvious question: If the long American presence in Viet Nam was misguided, is the American absence now also to become a national nightmare? Must Americans feel as haunted about the close of the war as they were about its conduct?

The official answers have not been reassuring. In his press conference, President Ford seemed to believe that the sacrifice of U.S. dead and wounded would be in vain unless Congress voted new military aid to Viet Nam. Many Vietnamese and foreign observers were quick to blame the U.S. for the plight of South Viet Nam. Saigon's ambassador to Washington, Tran Kim Phuong, stated that it is "probably safer to be an ally of the Communists." In a wild-eyed broadside in the New York Times, Sir Robert Thompson, consultant on guerrilla warfare to President Nixon, argued that "a new foreign policy line has already been laid down by Congress: if you surrender, the killing will stop. It is a clear message, to the world, of the abject surrender of the United States."

A calmer reckoning of American responsibility must be made in several stages--the initial involvement, the continuation of the war in the face of prohibitive human and material cost, the withdrawal of American troops and airpower, and finally the events since the Paris peace accords.

It is now almost universally conceded that the American intervention in Viet Nam was a mistake--a mistake that involved four Presidents, many of the nation's top statesmen. Once they had followed the French into the wrong war for the wrong reasons, they failed to heed the evidence that--short of the notorious suggestion to bomb the country back into the Stone Age--the Viet Nam War could never be "won" in the traditional sense. At fault perhaps was an American inability to accept defeat, or a hypnotic preoccupation with the models of previous, simpler wars. There was no precedent to quote, no guidebook to lead the way out.

This dilemma produced not only tragedy for the Vietnamese but a series of mistakes, half-truths, lies and euphemisms that damaged the fabric of American society. Leaders first deceived themselves and then deceived the public. The American people, misled from the top and from the sides, underwrote an opaque conflict that neither generals nor Presidents quite comprehended. The tragedy was only heightened by the fact that the U.S. entered the war not for any base reasons, but out of an understandable desire--although many saw the conflict as merely a civil war--to thwart Communist aggression. Even Senator J. William Fulbright, long a foe of the American involvement in Viet Nam, concedes that the war was not fought "because of any bad motives or evil purposes, but because some of our leaders didn't understand the situation."

One of the war's victims was the national conscience, which was never able to reconcile America's lofty intentions with the slaughter that appeared every evening on the TV screens. In a melancholy, prophetic book, Tragedy and Philosophy, Princeton Philosopher Walter Kaufmann departed briefly from his discussion of ancient Greek and Elizabethan plays to mention Viet Nam. His explanation of why the U.S. seemed somehow unable to quit the war in 1968 is a therapeutic jolt for those who prefer not to recall the recent past. "If we stop, our guilt is palpable," he wrote, "all this hell for nothing. Hence we must incur more guilt, and more, and always more to cleanse ourselves of guilt. Here is a parallel to Macbeth." But in real as in theatrical tragedy, the killing had to stop.

It will always be an open and disturbing question whether the U.S. could and should have pulled out sooner than it did.

At any rate, those who are quick to judge cannot have it both ways: they cannot condemn the violence of the war and simultaneously criticize the U.S. for putting an end to its part in the violence.

In the two years since the Paris accords, it was almost certainly a mistake, another self-deception, to assume that President Nguyen Van Thieu could fight the other side to a standstill without U.S. troops or airpower. Even though large numbers of South Vietnamese clearly still wanted to fight the Communists, it might have been far wiser to prod Saigon into a compromise with the Communists.

This might have ultimately saved lives in Viet Nam and provided a less calamitous finale.

What of the argument that the U.S. had a moral commitment after the Paris accords to support Thieu with military aid? It did have such a commitment, and it did supply such aid. But it is hard to maintain that paring down that aid was a breach of the commitment, or that the commitment had to run indefinitely. One thing is evident: continuation of American military aid, even at much higher levels, even with the additional amount requested by the President, could not have basically changed the situation. It might have prolonged Saigon's resistance without a clear end in sight. Cuts in U.S. assistance certainly were a factor (see "The Anatomy of a Debacle," page 16). But this cannot account for the total collapse of Thieu's armies--the corruption, waste, demoralization, the acts of pillage and murder against the very people the troops were supposed to be defending.

The American appetite for self-blame can be just as dangerous as heedlessness or irresponsibility. After meeting with Secretary of State Kissinger last week, onetime Under Secretary of State George Ball said: "The thing that alarms me the most is the attitude of wringing hands, that 'no one will believe America again.' That's just nonsense. Most of our allies feel we should have got out of Viet Nam long ago and are happy that the exodus has finally been accomplished."

Given a wiser policy, the exodus could have been accomplished less bitterly, with less damage to the American reputation. But basically Ball is right.

America cannot escape responsibility for Viet Nam. Nor can the recognition of Saigon's own fatal weakness, which is ultimately to blame, assuage the national grief for the Vietnamese in their final agony. But America did not enlist in the war for life. There cannot be an infinite cycle of protests, recrimination and guilt. The U.S. has paid for Viet Nam--many times over. A phase of American history has finished. It is time to begin anew.

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