It has become fashionable to recall the Vietnam War with nostalgia and not a little revisionism. We want to remember it as a Good War. But it wasn’t. We want to remember it as a could have been a good war if only… But it wasn’t that either. It wasn’t a Good War. It was only Our War.
But we want to forget that it wasn’t a Good War. That’s understandable. The country was riven at the time and the poor guys coming home felt projected onto them, at best, ambiguity, at worst, hostility as the manifestation of the national disarray. We wanted to forget about the war, forget about them. Of course they did not deserve that. But equally clear is that they did not deserve to be sent into hostilities of such dubious national interest, such international calumny, such utter wretchedness.
For my generation of men, boys then, the war was the Sword of Damocles. I was in the last cohort where the draft was the so-called quota system. By then of course, and I’m talking 1968, the quota was infinite and the system was lethally efficient. Everyone in my high school, the boys that is, saw the future in terms of the war. Either they had some sort of plan for deferment or the plan was laid out for them. Around 80% of the boys in my class went in. Way too many didn’t come out.
We like to forget now, and we Americans love to forget, that Vietnam was sold to a nation that had created its narrative in WW2. Our fathers defeated Hitler. Our fathers saved the Jews, and the Slavs, and the Gypsies, and all the little countries of Europe. Our fathers had liberated the slave labor camps of Southeast Asia and had driven the Japanese to abandon their imperialist aspirations. Our fathers had fought a Good War.
Then the story became a little less convenient when our uncles and cousins fought the Red Chinese to a stalemate in Korea. That wasn’t such a Good War and we didn’t win and even if we had, the side we saved from the commies wasn’t really any better than the nazis.
Then it was our turn. For most of us, it started slowly, almost imperceptibly. At least for me, when the French were bloodied in their colony somewhere south of everywhere, I was really too young to know what was happening other than to latch onto the music of the name on the evening news: Dien Bien Phu. When Kennedy sent “advisors”, I was mostly trying to get the better of long division. Then, as I became more aware of the world, the world had some new words for me: Domino Effect, escalation, napalm, and of course, body count. And even before the internet, we had access to information. We could know, if we chose to look, that Nguyen, and Ngo, and Minh, and all the other tin-pot autocrats were corrupt dictators and if we saved their bacon their people would continue to be oppressed. We could know, if only we chose not to ignore it, that the only American interests in Southeast Asia were tin, and rubber, and oil. We weren’t called to liberate the downtrodden. We weren’t called to contain the imperialist aspirations of Ho Chi Min. He had none. No. We were called to keep the dominoes from falling, whatever that means. We were called to make the world safe for Alcoa. As it turned out, the sons of families with no money were called to make sure the families with lots of money would get to keep it.
So the Vietnam War didn’t fit the narrative we had learned to tell ourselves. It wasn’t a Good War. It was a decidedly crappy war. We weren’t the Greatest Generation. We weren’t even the Beat Generation. We were the Vietnam War Generation. What a load of crap!
So, yeah, let’s remember the Vietnam War. And let’s remember that it wasn’t the fault of any of those kids that their war was a travesty built on a shit-pile of lies. But that’s what it was. They are no more responsible for that horror show than our fathers were for their Good War. You see, unlike the current lies we’re used to telling ourselves, the US Military is NOT responsible for “defending our liberties”. The last time that was true of an armed force it was the continental militias. The US Military, like the US Foreign Service, and US AID and who knows who else, executes policy as directed by the civilian government. Sometimes, and not really all that often and NEVER in my lifetime, that policy is directly concerned with defending at least somebody’s liberty. In Vietnam, the policy sucked. And so the war sucked. And it still sucks.
