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Looking back on Vietnam
Salon presents a week-long retrospective on the war and its consequences, at home and abroad.
By Fiona Morgan
[04/24/00]

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[04/21/00]

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By Fiona Morgan and Daryl Lindsey

April 24, 2000 |  Bobbie Ann Mason, novelist, author of "In Country"

The resistance to the war was partly a baby boomer thing. College kids raised on "Leave It To Beaver" were suddenly threatened with personal danger (You want me to do -- WHAT?). Since then, we've been through various phases of boomer concerns -- career, family, inner child, working-out, stock options, etc. Now the Golden Years are fast closing in, and I expect Baby-Boomer Adventures in the Nursing Home to be no less self-centered. I'm counting on boomers to battle mortality just as they did in the '60s. I confess to some nostalgia for that time -- the intensity, the drama, the music.

No matter how self-centered, the '60s rebellion was basically noble and right. Youthful eyes could penetrate falseness and hold the country to its own highest ideals. The threat of death concentrates the mind beautifully, it's said. That happened to the mind of an entire generation. I credit the anti-war movement -- and the whole social upheaval -- for opening up American society in a chaotic, but rather wonderful, way. Anything is possible was the premise; now anything can be examined, investigated, analyzed. Everything is up for exploration and in that mood we met the 21st century. We live in dizzying but exhilarating times.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

But an evil has always haunted the heart of the American dream -- ranging from slavery to the devastation of Native Americans to exploitation of foreign workers. The kind of injustice done to the less privileged draftee grunts who died in disproportionate numbers in the Vietnam War continues in its various forms.

In my novel "In Country," one of the characters, a Vietnam vet, says, "What you learn from history is that you can't learn from history -- that's what history is." During the Gulf War I had a sinking feeling that this was true. The U.S. was once again gearing up for a questionable overseas venture -- this time to exorcise the ghost of our defeat in Vietnam. But Vietnam is embedded in our history; it's part of us.

Philip Caputo, author of "A Rumor of War"

The Vietnam War achieved the reunification of North and South Vietnam under Communist rule; so from our point of view, it did not accomplish anything and was therefore not worth the cost. Revisionist historians who now say it was worth the price are wrong. Like a lot of Americans, they cannot accept the fact that we wasted 58,000 American lives and many billions of dollars fighting an unwinnable war.

That's a bitter truth to swallow, but I don't think denying it or revising it will do us any good; on the contrary, it could do harm, because overall the country has made a lot of progress coming to terms with the tragedy, and it's done so by facing it for the debacle it was.

I don't buy the idea, currently advanced by these historians, that the war was not a war but a "lost campaign" in the Cold War that somehow or other contributed to our triumph over the Soviet Union. I'm not agile enough for that leap of logic. We committed 2.6 million troops, dropped several times the tonnage of bombs that were dropped by both sides in World War II and suffered 365,000 dead and wounded. That in addition to the estimated 5 million civilian and military casualties suffered by the Vietnamese, North and South. To my mind, brothers and sisters, that's a war.

As for the assertion that we could have won had we fought harder, I'm at a loss as to what more we could have, or should have, done. Invaded the North? Then we would have had to fight everyone, men, women and even children, and our casualties would have been horrendous. In the end, the war was always the South Vietnamese's to win or lose.

The war's effects on our foreign and military policies have been beneficial for the most part. Leaders in the U.S. today require a clear mandate from the American people before committing troops to battle, and they demand a clear objective. In other words, America is less likely to leap blindly into a quagmire, which doesn't mean, of course, that it's incapable of stumbling into one again.

As the epicenter of the cultural and social earthquake that shook America in the 1960s and 1970s, its influence has been profound, and not entirely for the better. A book would be required to describe and explain the changes it wrought on our institutions and values; it's sufficient for now to say that the America we live in was formed during the Vietnam era. The old order, "the establishment," that had run the country for many decades -- mostly white, male and Protestant -- lost its "right to rule" because it was discredited by its folly in pursuing a disastrous policy in Southeast Asia.

As its grip on the reins of power loosened, the civil rights, feminist and environmental movements gained strength, and our country today is far more egalitarian and tolerant than it was 30 or 40 years ago. (I'm 58 and I remember seeing "colored only" signs on bathroom doors and over drinking fountains in the South in 1964.)

But if America has become a more just society, it also has become more fragmented, with a diminished consensus on social, cultural and moral values, and that splintering of our vision is one of the worst effects of the Vietnam era. Sometimes I think that the only things holding us together are our current prosperity -- which could end in the near future -- and televised sports.

The questioning of authority that characterized the '60s and '70s went much too far, in my opinion, extending beyond the establishment's war policies to the story of America itself. One commentator [John Hellman, a professor at Ohio State University] summed it up in these words: "On the deepest level, the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future."

Next page | David Frum: "The ending of the war was disgraceful"