NORTH
COAST
T IM E S
P A G E 11
E A G L E , MA Y/JUNE 2005
WHY THE VIETNAM WAR STILL MATTERS
BY JACKSON LEARS
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Vietnam War, which the United States
lost after a decade o f intense escalation, ended 30 years
ago, on April 30, 1975 (two centuries and 11 days after the
American Revolution began). The emergence of the USA
as the most powerful nation in history is commemorated
during this year’s 60th anniversary of warfare’s most
dramatic event, the nuclear holocaust of two Japanese
cities that ended World War 2. But the U.S. was challenged
by another rising superpower, Soviet Russia which had at
enormous cost — 24+ million at latest count— defeated the
principal Nazi German army (May 8 is VE Day) and absorbed
eastern Europe as the fulcrum of its fatally inflated empire.
The upper layer Cold War that resulted precipitated hot wars
in relatively obscure 3rd world regions. The Vietnam War
was a sideshow that took over prime time by its duration
and futility. The American government was willing to sacri
fice a generation to the war.The American public was not,
and ultimately prevailed though many thousands died in the
interim and many more millions o f lives were shattered or at
least irreversibly altered by the war.
George Bush’s victory in 2004 signified the triumph of
lies. Some of the least examined lies involved the history of the
Vietnam War. In their attacks on Kerry’s antiwar dissent, Bush
and his Swift Boat allies advanced a rightwing narrative of the
Vietnam War — a narrative that legitimated current administra
tion policy in Iraq. Popular acceptance of this story required
widespread ignorance of what actually happened in our recent
past. The diffuse but undeniable influence of the Swift Boat
slanders was a symptom of the collective amnesia that threat
ens democratic debate in the contemporary United States.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of
memory against forgetting,” the Czech novelist Milan Kundera
wrote. During the 20th century, control over public perceptions
of the past has become an essential strategy for the mainten
ance of state power. Kundera opened The Book o f Laughter and
Forgetting by recalling the disappearance of a Communist leader
from official photographs after he had been charged with treason
and hanged. Anyone who questioned the regime’s legitimacy
could simply be airbrushed out of history. Our postmodern media
managers are subtler, but in reshaping the public memory of the
Vietnam War they have accomplished something even more
impressive. They have erased the experience of an entire gener
ation.
Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, rightwing journalists
and intellectuals have been successfully selling a fictional
explanation for American defeat in Vietnam. It is a variant of the
“stab in the back" story concocted by German nationalists after
their defeat in World War 1. The American mission in Vietnam,
from the post-Reagan view, was a “noble cause” done in by
cowardly campus radicals and their allies in the “liberal media,”
whose combined pressure on politicians forced the military to
fight “with one hand tied behind its back.” During the last 25
years, this rightist fairy tale has seeped into our popular culture
— in the regularly scheduled rants of talk-radio and cable tele
vision hosts, in films from Rambo to Fomrest Gump, and in the
rhetoric of politicians in both parties. By the ‘90s, even liberals
were too cowed by this bizarre account of the Vietnam War to
recall the actual events of the era.
Yet for a moment in July 2004, on the last night of the
Democratic Convention, it seemed as if one major party, at least,
might finally be remembering the truth about the Vietnam War.
In different ways, Max Cleland and John Kerry made the same
larger point: Despite having volunteered for the war, many
veterans came to see it as a catastrophic mistake sustained
by systematic mendacity. Opposition to this war was a patriotic
service. For a moment that night in July, as Cleland and Kerry
recalled their commitment and disillusionment, it looked as if our
politicians might finally be coming to grips with the real meanings
of the American misadventure in Vietnam.
But that hopeful assumption underestimated the tenacity
of the rightwing narrative as well as its centrality to contemporary
Republican strategy. The Orwellian ‘Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth’ burst onto the post-convention scene, telling big lies and
sowing big doubts about Kerry's medals. In a predictable display
of phony “even-handedness,” the national media gave the Swift
Boat charges equal time with Kerry’s defense, as if lies and truth
deserved an even break from a responsible press.
The Swift Boat veterans embraced the “stab in the back”
story of defeat in Vietnam. They were enraged that Kerry told
the truth about the Vietnam War, as he did in his testimony to
Congress in 1971 when he reported the results of the Winter
Soldier Investigation. At this investigation, he testified, “over
150 honorably discharged, many highly decorated veterans,”
acknowledged their common participation in acts that could
be characterized as atrocities or even war crimes. These men
courageously questioned their own conduct, and demanded to
know how their government had placed them in conditions that
encouraged or even required that conduct. They spoke for them
selves and their comrades, those who had died as well as those
who lay helpless in veterans’ hospitals, forgotten by the prating
politicians who publicly claimed to exalt them.
The young Kerry was clear about who was responsible
for this disaster.He asked:“Where are the leaders of our country?
R iv e r S ea
GALLERY
C O N H AA P O R A R Y W O R K S O F A R T
PAINTINGS BY KATHERINE DUNN
& JAMES DUMBLE, MAY 14-JUNE 8
PAINTINGS BY JACK GUYOT &
KRISTIN SCHAUK THROUGH JUNE
1160 COMMERCIAL ST., ASTORIA ♦ 325-1270
MARTIN AVILLEZ
Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have
returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their
troops. . .These men have left all the casualties and retreated
behind a pious shield of public rectitude.”
This testimony is simply inadmissible to the sanitized
story of the Vietnam War that dominates contemporary politics.
GOOD QUESTION, VIETNAM
From questions submitted by Vietnamese people to the U.S.-
Indochina Educational Foundation for its “FAQ About America”
project. A number o f the questions will be answered by U. S.
educators, professionals, and others in a book that will be
published later this year by Phuong Nam, in Ho Chi Minh City.
When did your culture form?
What does a typical American look like? Do actors and
actresses in Hollywood movies possess characteristics of a
typical American?
What is Hollywood?
There are many sexy scenes in American movies. Does that
reflect the daily lives of Americans?
How many people in the USA like to drink Coke?
Why are American Presidents so bellicose?
Does the U.S. really wish for peace and happiness for other
countries, as they always announce in public?
What do Americans think about Communists?
People say that Americans look down on people of color and
people from 3rd World countries. Is that true?
Are Americans extravagant?
Americans are very combative, aren’t they?
Why do many Americans like to be single nowadays?
Americans seem to be superficial and not sincere. What do
you think about this?
Do you think using an excessive amount of slang will
gradually destroy the beauty of the English language?
What will happen if the American President doesn't carry out
the promises he made in the campaign?
What percentage of the U.S population wants to be a good
friend of Vietnam in all fields?
How can the post-traumatic stress disorder be solved? What
are the U S. responsibilities in solving it?
Why does America appear to be the major factor of almost
every war?
Which aspects of life are American people most interested in?
I have learned America is a free country; what is the real free
dom in this country?
The Swift Boat Veterans professed outrage at the very notion
that any Americans might have committed atrocities in Vietnam.
By focusing on ordinary soldiers and leaving policymakers out of
the picture, they avoided the larger meanings of that capacious
word, “atrocity" — the carpet bombing, the free fire zones, the
use of napalm and Agent Orange—all the government strategies
sanctioned by the highest military and civilian authority. Faith in
American virtue remained intact, and the erasure of collective
memory was stunning. About the time of the first Presidential
debate, a headline in the Village Voice read: “Kerry Was Right:
New Evidence of Vietnam Atrocities." As if Kerry needed “new
evidence" to confirm his own experience and the experience of
his contemporaries! Well, apparently he did.
In contrast to the media legitimation of the Swift Boat
Veterans’ lies, consider the discrediting of the essentially
accurate CBS report on Bush's National Guard service.
The truth about Bush's service — or lack of it — disappeared
beneath a fog of charges and countercharges regarding the
authenticity of several letters written by Bush's commanding
officer, Lt.Col. Jerry Killian. No matter that the colonel’s secretary
confirmed the substance of the documents (while asserting that
she herself had not typed them). No matter that the former
lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, admitted publicly that
he was “ashamed" of securing preferential treatment for Bush
and other wealthy, well-connected young men. The letters could
not be authenticated, and that became the story.
The problem here was not that Bush evaded the draft
or even that he did so by benefiting from economic privilege.
No one should have to apologize for avoiding that vile war by
any means necessary. The problem was that his behavior
epitomized the hypocrisy of the draft-dodging hawk. Like most
of his administration, Bush vigorously supported the war while
even more vigorously trying to evade it, and ever since his entry
into Presidential politics his handlers have concealed their
candidate's spotty military record while outfitting him in military
costumes and posing him as a courageous commander in chief,
brimming with “resolve." He became the quintessential post
modern patriot, for whom the appearance of bravery is more
important than the actuality.
The acquiescence of the national media allowed this
pose to work. The draft-dodging hawks embodied heroic leader
ship, while Bush's opponent was “perceived" (we were told) as
indecisive and weak — this man who courageously volunteered
for combat, then came home and courageously criticized the
insane policies he had seen on the ground in Vietnam. One
does not have to be an uncritical fan of Kerry to feel the outrage
at the injustice done to him. Under the barrage of Republican
disinformation, his noblest moments became the seed of his
undoing. No wonder so many of us, when we encountered the
national media coverage of this campaign, felt that we had
entered an “Alice in Wonderland" world, as the novelist and
Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien said of the Swift Boat controversy
— a world where factual evidence was ignored, common-sense
perceptions of reality were reversed and history was refashioned
to meet the needs of those in power.
The consequences for contemporary politics cannot
be overestimated. Refusal to come to grips with our defeat in
Vietnam — to reflect on the hazards of a morally charged hubris
— lies at the core of our current misadventures abroad. Bush’s
advisers came of age in the shadow of that defeat, determined
to deny its significance by reasserting imperial power on a grand
scale, just as German nationalists had longed to do in the wake
of World War 1. That dream of national regeneration, combined
with our collective amnesia, lets the Bush administration ignore
the growing parallels between the failed policy in Iraq and the
failed precedent in Vietnam: the millenarian fantasies used to
justify the war; the ignorance of local culture and custom; the
reiteration of empty platitudes as chaos looms; the fetish of
“free elections;" the soldiers trapped in an impossible assign
ment — as vulnerable to local hostility as any Western army
of occupation has ever been in any country with a history of
colonial domination.
The most important parallel is the government’s inability
to tell the truth about the war. The lie at the center of the right-
wing Vietnam narrative — the stab-in-the-back story — was
central to Bush's campaign strategy, and continues to underwrite
support for his war in Iraq. The belief (against all evidence) that
the troops in Vietnam were somehow betrayed by the antiwar
movement, rather than by the men who sent them there, remains
a powerful rhetorical weapon. It allows Bush and his handlers to
equate criticism of government policy with treason — or at best
with a failure to “support our troops." The persistence of this
twisted logic underscores the continuing relevance of the young
John Kerry's charge: that the people who have truly abandoned
our troops are the policymakers who sent them on a fool’s errand
under cover of false claims, and then “retreated behind a pious
shield of public rectitude.” They’ve done it again. That is why the
Vietnam War still matters.
Jackson Lears is editor of Raritan and most recently
author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America. This article is
reprinted from In These Times.
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