Ma
James Reston Jr.
There
are two Vietnam wars, and the second is still going 40 years after the
first ended. The United States fought the first one from 1959 to 1975 in
the jungles, villages and airspace
of Indochina. The second is the war over how that war, the first lost
war in America’s national history, is remembered. This month, as Ken
Burns’ 10-part Vietnam documentary is aired on PBS, the second conflict
is sure to heat up again with renewed intensity.
The
positions will be fiercely argued. What was the war good for?
Absolutely nothing, as the 1970 song put it? Or was it a heroic cause?
The most important — and poignant — group who
will offer answers to these questions is Vietnam veterans themselves.
They
see themselves reflected, against the roll of the dead, on the black
granite walls of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, or
in the faces of Frederick Hart’s evocative
sculpture of three soldiers nearby.
Many
who served came home and got on with their lives, whatever the wounds
and scars of war. A more visible subset of aging warriors sits astride
motorcycles in Veterans Day parades
or stands in the median strips of our streets holding cardboard
placards. They live their lives as war survivors. They ponder what might
have been.
Those who served in Vietnam or resisted may never be considered members of a Greatest Generation,
like World War II veterans.
Often,
no matter how their lives have unfolded, Vietnam vets have a chip on
their shoulder. They ask or wish that their patriotism, their service,
be better recognized, even glorified:
They stepped forward, regardless of the flawed rationale and conduct of
the war, when hordes of other young men, especially the so-called best
and brightest, avoided the unpleasantness altogether.
For
those who avoided the draft and the danger, there is often a quiet
guilt — I have witnessed it many times. They dodge the inevitable
question: How did you manage to get out of
it? Hasty marriage? Graduate school? A trick knee? Men in this category
do not invite conversation about that time in their lives, any more
than combat veterans discuss the horrendous things they witnessed in the
war zone. Only those who came of age after
the draft turned into a lottery, the ones with high, untouchable
numbers, or those who arrived after the Army went voluntary, escaped the
moral dilemma of serving or resisting or malingering.
The
statistics are revealing. Of the 26.8 million men who were eligible for
service during the war period, 15.4 million were deferred, exempted or
disqualified. Of those who served,
2.1 million were deployed to Vietnam. More than 58,000 died, 300,000
were wounded and 245,000 have filed for injuries incurred by exposure to
the defoliant weapon Agent Orange. More than 50,000 draft-age men fled
to Canada and Sweden. There are no statistics
on those who suffer from permanent psychological wounds.
The
men who actively protested against the war may feel best about
themselves. They were engaged in the struggle of their generation, and
they deserve the lion’s share of credit for
stopping the war. Their resistance, especially from 1967 to 1969, when
U.S. casualties were the highest, forced the hand of America’s leaders.
They have a better argument for serenity in their old age than those who
merely avoided service and stood smugly
on the sidelines.
Then
there are the politicians. The rationale for American involvement — the
phony Tonkin Gulf resolution and the discredited domino theory — forced
the moral dilemma on the Vietnam
generation. Five years after Saigon fell, in the election of 1980,
presidential candidate Ronald Reagan romanticized the conflict as a
“noble cause.” He planted the enduring notion, so popular on political
hustings nowadays, that America must never again
fight a war it does not intend to win. This glib rhetoric is sure to be
prominent in renewed debates over the war, and it may make those who
bear the brunt of the war’s loss feel better: It wasn’t their fault. But
scoffing detractors will ask whether more
troops and more bombs would really have ensured victory. They will turn
Reagan’s phrase upside down: America must never again force another
generation to choose between service or resistance in an arguably
immoral war.
It
is with bitter irony that the Vietnam generation has witnessed the
friendly visits of Presidents Clinton and Bush (both of whom avoided the
war) to Hanoi, or the jovial Oval Office
interchange between President
Trump(deferred because of bone spurs) and Nguyen Xuan Phuc,
the prime minister of our new ally and bulwark against China, the
People’s Republic of Vietnam. They must cope with the recent revelations
that Richard Nixon scuttled a Lyndon Johnson peace
deal during the 1968 election for cold political reasons, a deal that
might have saved the 20,000 American soldiers who died during Nixon’s
subsequent six-year presidency. With mixed feelings or quiet applause,
they watched John Kerry, a bonafide war hero and an
antiwar leader, in his last act as secretary of State, meet the Viet
Cong veteran who tried to kill him in the murky waters of the Mekong
Delta.
Reconciliation
after divisive wars, especially a lost war, is a tricky business. Those
who served in Vietnam or resisted may never be considered members of
aIn the early 1980s, the
design for the now-celebrated Vietnam memorial wall — a site that has
evolved into a place of contemplation for the pacifist as well as the
warrior — attracted advocates and enemies who saw it as yet another
opportunity to re-fight the war. An editorial in
the Boston Globe summarized what would become a five-year art battle
this way: “Commemorating the war in Vietnam is likely to prove no
simpler than fighting it.”
The Burns documentary airs in a week. Get ready for another round.
James
Reston Jr. will be interviewed about his latest book, “A Rift in the
Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam Memorial,” at
Chevalier’s Books on Sept. 28. Reston served
in the U.S. Army from 1965 to 1968, and is a senior scholar at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center.
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