The War That Never Ends: New Perspectives on the Vietnam War

Introduction: Why Vietnam Still Matters

Introduction Why Vietnam Still Matters Marilyn Young I told [Jordan's King Abdullah] I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families. I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of America. -George W. Bush (May 2004) Jon, there's no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn't be judged on the actions of a ... well, that we shouldn't be judged on actions. It's our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn't mean it's something we would do. -Rob Corddry explaining Abu Ghraib to Jon Stewart, The Daily Show (May 2004) In 1965, the Pentagon released a documentary entitled Why Vietnam, a sequel to the World War II series Why We Fight. 1 James C. Thomson Jr., then on the staff of the National Security Council, wrote the script. "As I recall;' Thomson told an interviewer many years later, "Mac Bundy told me the President wanted to put out something in the next couple ofweeks that would put together what he had said, what Rusk had said, what McNamara had said on three aspects of the war: the diplomatic, the mili- Southeast Asia after Geneva :· REPUBLIQUE POPULAIRE DE CHINE f ....{PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA)·._..· ~-: 7,·......· BIRMANIE (BURMA) THA'iLANDE (THAILAND) ~ Limit of French Indochina·....·········...___...· New borders resulting from the Geneva Conference .......,..,_ 7 "-::.:-.Anna·~\ ...·--·......··c.. SUD \.(SOUTH) : II •••Angkor ~ha Trang CAMBODGE ,.r-~J~TNAM (CAMBODIA) ,....:: (VIETNAM .:-..... qrpSa'igo ____;::;.....· ..__, 0 0 50 100 miles tary, and the sort of peace-making or international development aspect:' Thomson, "only partly facetiously;' had tried to retitle the film "Why Vietnam ?" but he had "lost out on that and the question mark was dropped, because it was clearly an assertion and not a question:'2 Nevertheless, it has remained a question ever since. Why Vietnam Still Matters 3 Why Vietnam. This is a statement that insistently implies a question. One might suppose that why Vietnam still matters similarly harbors a question, but it does not. On the contrary, Vietnam seems always to matter , perhaps most especially when it is being actively denied. Each conflict in which the United States has engaged since 1975 begins with policymakers and generals stating, with confident emphasis: This is not Vietnam. By that they mean: This time the United States will not lose, this time we were right to start a war, this time the American public will embrace our war utterly . Then, if the war lasts longer than a month or two, Vietnam creeps back in, at first in the form of a question. Is this Vietnam? Sometimes, as in the case of Afghanistan, the question has been asked, answered, and then asked again. On October 31, 2001, R. W Apple, who had reported on Vietnam for the New York Times, raised the issue directly in an article headlined "A Military Quagmire Remembered; Afghanistan as Vietnam:' Apple's concerns were quickly buried as Afghanistan became a success story-at least as compared with Iraq. By the fall of2006, however, as the war intensified, Afghanistan as Vietnam was back in the news. More often the question Another Vietnam? takes the form of a denial . At the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, Gen. Tommy Franks announced, "We don't do body counts:' Andrew Bacevich, who fought in Vietnam before he became a historian, explained that "Franks was speaking in code:' Not doing body counts meant not doing what had been done in Vietnam, counting the bodies of the enemy dead as proof of U.S. progress in the war. "Franks was not going to be one of those generals re-fighting the last war;' Bacevich wrote. "Unfortunately, Franks and other senior commanders had not so much learned from Vietnam as forgotten it:'3 Forgetting is a form of remembering. Vietnam matters not only when it is denied but also when it is embraced . In the late summer of 2005, a group of men in surplus military gear moved out on patrol through the scrub of central Virginia hunting VietCong. Hiding somewhere out there, men and women in black pajamas (and, in one case, genuine North Vietnamese canvas...