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sight of dead or wounded GIs was considered bad for morale
American deaths were edited out of the war at the same time
the war's measure of success was a grossly exaggerated body
count of enemy dead.
After the euphoria of the initial buildup of troops 30
years ago, after Operation Starlight and the la Drang Valley,
after Tet'68 and Khe Sanh, after Hue and My Lai, after Nixon
sent the Army into Cambodia and it returned with heroin, the
American public became dismayed with its soldier sons and
daughters. Something solid was expected of soldiers, but the
Vietnam generation was beginning to change - and into what?
The soldiers w ire peace medallions into combat, smoked
marijuana, killed their superiors and sabotaged weapons and
equipment, and rebelled against the military by the thousands
No one but the soldiers understood that the rebellion was a
desperate yet rational response to the war and the inequities of
the military system and its callous disregard for the lives of its
lower ranks. The ratio of approximately 14 noncombatants to
one combat man, the racial tensions that threatened to engulf
every military installation at home, in Europe and Asia; the draft
that provided escape for the upper classes but none for the poor
or nonv/iite were some of the factors that heightened dissatis
faction in the ranks But it was the intensifying doubts about the
purpose and morality of the war itself that were the most unset
tling. For many soldiers, perhaps most, there was no other fight
in the war other than self-preservation mixed w th grim aware
ness they were being badly used. They were brutal, murderous
and insensitive.They were also terrified, anguished and spiritual
ly desolate.
On April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War finally ended, 10
years after American Marines landed in Da Nang and 3 years
after most U S. forces had been wthdrawn. The United States
spent a generation attempting to dominate Southeast Asia yet
the war was lost long before it committed its armies. We knew
little and cared less for the cultures and peoples that lived there
and our genocidal hubris ultimately caused our defeat.
The loss of the war in Vietnam shocked the people of
the United States. It might have been different if the war had
been wan. The people might not have been so ashamed or
divided Victory is its own therapeutic morality: if the war had
been won the cause would naturally have been considered just.
The men who designed the war blamed its loss on the
men and wamen who survived it. We were made its scapegoats
and shunned as lepers and losers. Our friends and families were
ashamed of us. We had been the nation's agents in a dirty,
unpopular and unsuccessful war and were as a result treated as
if we were also dirt. We were expected to pick up our lives as if
we had not been changed in the pitiless crucible of combat. War
pared us to the raw edge of perception but we were implored to
reaccept our culture's illusions and vanities and conform to a
perspective of history our experience repudiated.
We were pariahs not entirely because we rankled the
public memory: the war left us with irreversible knowledge about
ourselves that people usually wish to avoid. We learned that
only human beings commit inhuman acts and that the most
cherished and humane values serve as warcries to commit
horror. We learned that concepts about the worth of life are
worthless as arguments to preserve it. We discovered it is
absurdly easy to kill and that it is common to feel relief and
satisfaction at the anguish of someone else We learned how
to reduce flesh and blood to abstract contempt to facilitate our
reduction of it to dust
The price of survival has been high. Many disorders
which are still evident years afterward had their origin in the
terror directed at us and the terror we repaid it with. The sad
dest irony is that so many who fought like beasts to live through
the war have suicided since returning home. The poisons we
sprayed upon the Vietnamese are killing us now though the
government continues to stonewall the claims of hundreds of
veterans that they are sick or dying from the chemicals. Jails are
filled w th Vietnam veterans. We are alcoholics and heavy drug
users. We are unpredictably violent. All sorts of syndromes have
been attributed to us or invented to describe us. Studies are
routinely commissioned to define or find solutions to our social
depravity. We form rap groups to assist each other but these
often serve to intensify our maladjustment or alienation. A
number of veterans have retreated from civilization and live
isolated in forests and deserts. The nightmares that seldom
leave us have an incompleteness that reflects our fragmented
experience in the war. For most of the decade of massive
escalation hundreds of thousands of us went to war and returned
daily almost without notice. We passed each other going and
coming to and from Vietnam.
• The war never quite slides out of my thoughts. Some
times it lies quietly on the far side of my mind like a sleeping
dog but eventually something triggers its loop to the closer
circuit and almost everything I do, see or think about has its
parallel and its substance rooted in Vietnam. I spent only a
year in combat but it shines through the murk of subsequent
years with a clarity missing from the rest. To survive I cut off
sensitivities I believe are irrecoverably lost. I continue to feel
that every day is extra and I will never comprehend why or
adequately use to justify I believe I killed or was measurably
responsible for the deaths of Vietnamese whose lives were
worth more than my own, and that friends who died would have
been more useful than I am. I am haunted by the dead. Every
one who has endured combat is drawn ever afterward toward
death, grimly aware escape has only been temporary. Dead
friends vex survivors with sorrow and guilt and beckon for us to
rejoin their company
JOHN MCDONALD
I was at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington,
D C., when it was dedicated in 1982, looking for names of a few
dead friends I last saw wrapped in bloody ponchos and tossed
aboard outgoing helicopters I felt smothered by flags and
military bands and thought the ceremony had little to do with
reconciliation but was staged instead to revive a war fever that
Vietnam had cooled. Yet our presence must have been an
embarrassment, a tattered and crippled spectre of a lost war I
felt disconnected much the same as I might have felt at a class
or scout troop reunion I had forgotten names I thought I would
always remember Names of the dead occupy the black marble
wall of the Memorial chronologically by the days of their deaths,
arranged in daily sequence in alphabetical order so that they will
forever remain together, sculptor Maya Lin said. I ran my fingers
in the carved grooves of names I remembered They had been
dead a long time by then and I felt slightly indifferent. I realized
names that should have been on the wall were missing, some of
our o w i who had not been initially included for petty reasons,
such as those who died of wounds later and no women; but also
the names of dead allies and enemies, and especially millions of
ordinary people who were shot or bombed because it was their
bad luck to be in the way (They continue to die from landmines
planted everywhere in Vietnam and from malaria caused by
millions of bomb and shell holes that breed mosquitoes.) I
thought there should be a separate wall with the names of the
murdered dead of My Lai and Hue to serve as a warning that the
only enemy is the malevolence we humans display toward each
other. Almost unnoticed against the wall among flowers, war
medals and photographs of dead young soldiers, sailors, pilots
and Marines was a handlettered square of cardboard w th the
names of four war dead who had not been nor are yet included
They were killed 25 years ago this month. The four students shot
down by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State College in May
1970.
I left D.C. with friends from Oregon. We drove through
Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho
and Oregon, reaching home in Cannon Beach five days later
We stopped every night at motels or the homes of friends or
relatives, and each day we made several stops for food, gas and
just to get out and stretch. On the back wndow of our small
truck was a Vietnam Veterans of America sticker, the group that
built and dedicated the Vietnam War Memorial Everywhere we
stopped people noticed the sticker and almost everyone was
related to or knew someone killed in Vietnam
Everywhere we stopped I opened a book I purchased at
the Memorial. It was the size of a small city's phone directory
and contained the names engraved on the wall and where each
was located I looked up names people wished to see and many
touched the letters in the book as so many had embraced with
their fingers the names on the wall. By the time we reached the
Pacific Coast the American Book of the Dead was as well
thumbed as a phone book in a public booth Until then I had
not really understood the personal impact of Vietnam on
America's heart Each time I opened the book and looked for a
name I felt I was performing a ritual of immense unrecognized
grief.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Vietnam War
and a major reason the government would wish to suppress it
from public memory or attention is that a significant number of
Americans were against it. When they were rebuffed by the
government they went out into the streets and risked injury and
arrest Thousands of young men chose exile or jail over service
in Vietnam. Other thousands who were in the military rebelled
against it. Although a reconstructed myth portrays dissenters
as irresponsible students, antisocial hippies and various other
types of misfits and malcontents, the largest number of antiwar
activists were from the mainstream, and in the spring of 1971
the mainstream peaked when 500,000 of them -th e official body
count of U S. forces in Vietnam at the height of the escalation -
marched through the streets of Washington, D C., to demand an
end to the war Seldom mentioned and disparaged when it is, the
American people ultimately forced its government to abandon its
discredited ambitions in Southeast Asia It is that which disturbs
our leaders most and which they wiuld have us forget: that we
can and mus, if necessary curb our government's misuse of
power
Underneath the spectacle of pageantry and deceit of
patriotism, the disturbing presence of Vietnam veterans demon
strates wth the subtlety of a clenched fis, tha, war is death and
horror; it is murder and depravity and sickens the souls and
minds of its executioners Vietnam veterans give war a bad
name
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