American Wars, American Peace: Notes from a Son of the Empire

What I Learned in the Green Machine

What I Learned in the Green Machine Some months back, as an English faculty member at my university for three decades and an armored cavalry platoon leader thirty-five years ago in Vietnam, I accepted an invitation from the army ROTC unit on campus to speak at an annual social event called the military ball. To anyone who has served in uniform in one of the armed forces, such festivities—formal receptions, dining-ins, unit anniversaries, and the like—are always great, high-spirited, celebratory occasions, with a long history in the military services. “Dress blues, tennis shoes, and a light coat of oil,” as we used to say in the old army. I had been asked by a favorite student from one of my American literature classes, a smart, 120 PgE [121 funny, hardworking guy who was about to graduate and accept his commission . As someone who had been thinking a good bit lately about old wars and young people, I readily accepted. At the same time, in terms of personal and political attitudes, I couldn’t help thinking how strangely the three-plus decades since my own army experience had brought me to the point where I could even consider accepting such an invitation. One of the last things I had done at the Oakland Army Discharge Center around dawn one day sometime in early May 1970—after having been flown into Travis Air Force Base from Bien Hoa in the middle of the night—was to take every single piece of uniform I had left, save the new class-A khakis I had been issued so as to qualify for a discount military airfare on the plane ride home, and deposit them—“shitcan” was the word we used at the time—into a fiftygallon drum in the barracks where I had caught a few hours of sleep. Once home and back in graduate school, I grew as much unauthorized hair as quickly as possible, and, save on the rare occasion when I might run into another quiet, restless, solitary vet, tried to forget about the military and think of other things. Ditto in the mid-1970s when I began my first and last university job—the one I still cherish today—teaching and writing about early American literature on a big state flagship campus. Meanwhile, the Vietnam army experience I thought I had shitcanned began to catch up on me. Just as I found a lifelong academic subject in my investigations of life and culture in early America, so also did I find the basic myths of that culture—our incorrigible beliefs in our national exceptionalism, with their attendant assumptions of American historical innocence and geopolitical invincibility—persistently and, it seemed to me, relentlessly refigured in cultural representations of the American experience of the Vietnam War. I wrote two books about the literature of the war. Eventually I found myself able to watch some of the movies. They went into the critical mix as well. I read a lot of the history, and, with a Vietnamese friend finishing a Harvard doctorate in French, began teaching courses on historical, literary, and film representations of the war in the contexts of American, French, and Vietnamese language, life, and culture. I turned to work on a new book, Late Thoughts on an Old War, for the first time combining cultural reflection with autobioWHAT I LEARNED IN THE GREEN MACHINE 121 graphical memory. Suddenly, years after I thought I had shitcanned it all, I was somehow again making my own passage through the green machine—ROTC, the officer basic course, the endless stateside training; the sudden descent into the jungle, the heat, the sweat, the sleeplessness, the black diarrhea; the boredom, the vigilance, the miserable fear punctuated by actual moments of terrified response to combat; the coming home to a place we called “back in the world,” basically sentenced to silent, solitary confinement on the grounds that even if one could tell the story, there would be virtually no one in the entire country who would care to hear about it. Suddenly, I was there again thirty-five years later, completely able to relate to them, as we used to say—the young people, the latest crop, committed to serving as platoon leaders and company commanders on the ground in a controversial, increasingly unpopular war not of their choosing . They would fight as alleged...