ESSAY

By WALTER SHAPIRO

In the Saturday afternoon sun of a somber January, the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were warm, almost animate to the touch. A blond teenage girl with a paper dove in her hair from an antiwar rally stood near two fortyish men talking softly about a bungled mortar attack a generation and half a world away. Two helicopters whirred overhead, the sound both jarring and fitting. Odd how certain names leaped to the eye and touched the heart. Irvin W. Prosser Jr., Zygmunt Kowalewski, Sherl K. Bonnett. Strangers all, so there were no images of them as soldiers or as high school classmates. Instead the vision came of proud fathers, perhaps survivors of World War II combat, holding up their squawking boy babies and announcing to the world, "He'll have my name, Irvin." "I'll call him Zygmunt." "I'll name him Sherl after his grandfather. He'll have a good life, a long life, a life of peace."

My father returned from World War II with these same hopes, and for the most part, they have been realized for his only son. I was privileged. Vietnam was my war, but only in the sheltered, student-deferment sense that I opposed it, marched against it and denounced it as immoral. Perhaps that explains why I had in the past approached the Vietnam Memorial with trepidation, feeling I was intruding upon the grief of others. But on the first weekend of the air war against Iraq, I found myself impelled toward these sunken slabs on the Mall, as if this were the proper moment to seek communion with the wall of names. My thoughts jumbled as I stood there: schoolboy patriotism, the waste of war, the sands of time. Finally, I murmured, "I hope we have learned the right lessons from Vietnam. I hope I have."

Those sentiments reflect how personally bound I feel in the decision of my government to go to war. No lesson of Vietnam has been more important than the respect for legality that prompted George Bush to win the endorsement of the United Nations and then, however belatedly, the U.S. Congress. Watching the congressional debate, I felt compelled to make my own decision on going to war as surely as if I had been elected to the national legislature. My anguished rationale for supporting the President -- oil, aggression and cynicism about sanctions -- turned into a footnote once Congress voted; what mattered was that at last proper constitutional norms had been followed. How easy it had been during Vietnam (a war mounted under the dubious fig leaf of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to reject personal complicity in the carnage. Blame, as I do, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the names on the wailing wall in Washington. But today, for the first time in my life, I freely accept, as an American citizen, responsibility for a war and the terrible human suffering that is its inevitable handmaiden.

On the home front, there are ennobling signs that the nation has transcended the bitter legacy of Vietnam. Aside from a few ill-timed sneers by Dan Quayle, no major public figure has maligned the patriotism of the antiwar protesters. Whatever one's personal views on the wisdom of the war, there is a collective sense of respect and obligation toward the men and women in uniform. Yes, the volunteer army means that the sacrifice of having a son, a relative, a friend in Saudi Arabia is shared unevenly. My own burden is scant. But class and caste also shielded people like me from the draft in the 1960s; for much of the Vietnam War, such social inequities were the dirty little secret of the upper middle class. This time, at least, the topic was a major theme of the congressional debate. Such honesty does not erase the unfairness of a volunteer army, but it does suggest national maturity.

Still, I brood about whether I am prepared for the horrors of what will come next, either the carnage of a ground war or the full revelation of civilian casualties within Iraq and Kuwait. Despite my informed consent as a citizen, a wave of queasiness hit me with the first air strikes against Baghdad. But then the euphoric opening days of the war made it seem as if America had perfected the neutron bomb in reverse: high-tech weaponry that only destroyed buildings, while leaving people miraculously unharmed. Even now, after more than a week of war, the cameras have yet to show a dead soldier. There is something tawdry about this Top Gun illusion of military action virtually devoid of unpleasant consequences.

How unnerving that we know so little about the realities of this war. The partial news blackout, stage-managed by the U.S. military, seems a never-again overreaction to Vietnam. The longer the nation is safeguarded from the full truth, the more jarring will be the recoil when the inevitable bad news hits. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney warned, "A military operation of this intensity and complexity cannot be scored every evening like a college track meet or a basketball game." What other choice do we have but to tot up the bombing sorties, mourn the downed flyers and pray for the best?

Technology is not fail-safe. Sooner or later a hospital, a school or an apartment block will be reduced to flesh and rubble by an errant U.S. bombing mission. How will I and the nation react to pictures of, say, an Iraqi woman, her clothes on fire, running, stumbling, screaming at the injustice of her fate? Intellectually, I will accept responsibility, for the saturation bombing of Iraq is part of a wrenching decision that my country made openly and democratically with my full complicity. But can I steel my emotions? A ground war in Kuwait will only be worse. Can I bear to watch a TV clip of a 22-year- old sergeant, a former Oklahoma high school running back, being ripped apart by an Iraqi mine? Turning away would be cowardly, and a government that sanitized such gore to soothe domestic sensibilities would be contemptible. For if I cannot confront the true face of this war, if I cannot endure the moral burden of the bleeding and dying, then -- so unlike with Vietnam -- I will have no one to blame but myself.