REBEL

11. Vietnam Reconsidered

Rebel 220 Vietnam Reconsidered Two decades later, it is still difficult for me to untangle my feelings about Vietnam and how they affected me then. Certain of my beliefs, they remain as they were before. For instance, I have no doubt today that the Vietnam policy, far from the “noble cause” described by President Reagan, was an American tragedy—moral, political , economic, and military. The rationale for the war—to stop Chinese communist expansion—was mistaken at the time, became absurd when Nixon shook hands with Mao Tse-tung, and turned grotesque as the American government eventually sided with China and the genocidal Khmer Rouge against Hanoi. I also continue to believe that the Vietnamese conducted one of the most remarkable and heroic resistances to foreign intervention in the annals of history. To salute their tenacity and skill is no more “unAmerican” than recognizing the greatness of Sitting Bull and the Sioux after the tragic battle of Little Big Horn. I also believe it is crucial to deflate the Rambo mentality of the mideighties , which assumed a mythical American invincibility, as well as the many revisionist histories that claim America was defeated at home rather than on the battlefield. When the world’s leading industrial power commits 500,000 troops and drops more bomb tonnage than that used by all sides in World War II, and still fails after a decade to crush the soldiers of an undeveloped peasant nation, the result is—in plain English—a defeat. I believe that as a nation we have to develop wisdom from the experience of losing, instead of indulging in romantic escapism about how things might have been. Since it is difficult to accept that 58,000 Americans died for false pride or, worse, for nothing, it is understandable that those responsible have searched for scapegoats. But the blame cannot and should not be shifted; otherwise the folly will be repeated. I also remain aware of the hypocritical double standards that tend to tarnish American judgments of revolution in other countries. We fought 11. 11. 221 our own American Revolution not only for independence, after all, but also as a nation that permitted slavery, denied rights to women, and overwhelmed its native inhabitants with false promises and brute force. Down through history and to this day, America has—for “strategic” purposes—befriended regimes, from white South Africa to Communist China, with worse human rights records than the Vietnamese regime we still shun. But I was also very wrong in certain of my judgments:Time has proved me overly romantic about the Vietnamese revolution. I think Paul Berman ’s 1987 observation in The New Republic was correct in saying that my writings at the time “misinterpreted the egalitarian selflessness that arises in any popular war, and in the first moments of any revolution, as an essential quality of Vietnamese communism.” The other side of that romanticism was a numbed sensitivity to any anguish or confusion I was causing to U.S. soldiers or to their families—the very people I was trying to save from death and deception. And I displayed a minimal concern over NLF-inflicted atrocities on Vietnamese civilians, as at Hué during the Tet offensive. As I consulted my old notebooks and tried to recreate the way I saw Vietnam in 1965–67, I was struck by the flatness of the panorama I painted. My tendency was to see everyone as gentle, as lacking hate, and as having insight. In my admiration, I turned the Vietnamese into caricatures of revolutionaries, a people who provided me with an alternative to cynicism. I failed to consider that the people I befriended were those most like myself: Western-educated, liberal, understanding of American society-exceptional bridges between our cultures. So identified was I with their people’s suffering and struggle that I lost objectivity; like an intoxicating spell, their mythical stature served to heighten my apocalyptic intuition of the American future. It was hard not to mythologize them, for they challenged the most fundamental of our conventional assumptions. Lyndon Johnson once called them a “raggedy-ass, little fourth-rate country.” Henry Kissinger refused to believe that a “little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point.” I delighted in the Vietnamese frustration of American arrogance and came to view them as representing the human spirit struggling against the most advanced technology ever used in war. Further, they exhibited a reverence for ancestors, for land, for the environment, against a...