On The War Victor Howard

I n his study of Vietnam veterans’ readjustment, Home From the War, Robert Lifton invokes the Holocaust to explain the trauma o f theconflict in Southeast Asia: “. . .a sense of world-destruction.’’ So savage was the fighting there, so thoroughly were Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia ruined that it must indeed seem to those who lived or who fought there that the world was beingdestroyed. But there are other “worlds.”In the jargon of the American serviceman, the United States was ‘The World,’ the insinuation being that Southeast Asia was not o n this planet, a n aberration, perhaps? And there is the ‘world’ that exists within each of us: m y identity, my sense o f self: liable to destruction, as well.

M y interest here is in setting forth a few observations, a judgment or two about the Americans who fought in Vietnam. And a case history: Mickey was a student o f mine for a year: a veteran of the lOlst Airborne Division, a year i n Vietnam, 1966-7, wounded, decorated, came home to college, to teaching, to counseling, then on to university to become a graduate student in American Studies with a particular interest in Black History and Culture. Then his infant son suddenly died and Mickey dropped out o f school and into a job with the state government.

Mickey was in class when his son was rushed to the hospital and as he ran to his car with the friend who brought him the news, he cried “l’m paying for it, I’m paying for it.” What Mickey believed he was paying for was the eighteen Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers he had officially killed in the war though he also accepts the likelihood that he killed another forty or so.

Mickey was in Vietnam when he was 18 and 19 which is appropriate since the average age of the American infantry m a n in that conflict was 19, the youngest in any war we have fought. A t that, he was the point man in his platoon of paratroopers, the first out along the trail. Since the f ighting was so unpredictable-booby traps, mines, ambushes-the career of the point m a n was filled, as they say, with jeopardy. But Mickey came to like his work, came to relish the excitement, came to be very good at what he did, came to feel he would never die. When his unit swooped into the landing zones, Mickey wuld stand on the skid o f the helicopter, one hand clutching the hatch door, the first one off, eager. Out there i n front, week after week, he developed such a delicate antenna that he became a charmed soldier. The men trusted him; he felt powerful responsibility for them. He will never live so keenly again, so fully.

Michael Herr has written in Dispatches of such men as Mickey: “classic essential American types: point men, isolatos and outriders, like they were

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programmed in theirgenes todo it, thefirst taste made them crazy for it, just like they knew it would. ’’ They were something more than just war-lovers. The very early, secret and corrupt insertion o f long rang reconnaisance patrols into places in Southeast Asia where they had no right to be sanctioned the metaphysics o f Indian-hating. The first generation must have felt some frustration when a half-million more Americans swarmed into the countryside and so greatly reduced the chance for that private journey. Which is not to say that the half-million didn’t create their own sad, savage mischief.

I doubt i f Americans at war have ever killed so viciously and completely as they did in Vietnam: killed because they had little patience for distinguishing between the enemy and the ally; killed out of a n enormous sense of futility; killed because their own deaths could never be justified. Mickey thinks kids like himself were raised on Tom and Jerry cartoons, as he puts it, illusions o f strife and hostility and wreckage which were supposed to be f u n n y and from which the adversaries emerged healed and ready to fight again next episode. These kids were raised, as well, on a n idea of invincibility. Even though John Wayne might die o n Iwo Jima, he didn’t really die. They could make f u n o f John Wayne, but they also thought that under his dispensation, they too would get up o f f the jungle floor, the gruesome fatal wounds would vanish and they would live to fight another day or better still, live another day.

These young Americans took with them, as they will to any war, a significant piece o f the United States, so much so this time, that South Vietnam became, for a while the 51st state. They took their music with them, of course, and the music was exactly in accord with the kind of war they fought: loud, discordant, rebellious, at times, pathological. Jimi Hendrix. Otis Redding. Motown. ( In WWII, we listened to ballads that told the sweetheart not to sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me; in Korea, we listened to the relevant words o f “Mule Train” and ‘‘Cry.’?

And their language: Remember Ernie Pyle who wrote all those books about G.I. Joe? No one ever cursed i n those books; they didn’t dare because Ernie was going to publish every last name and address o f the G.I.s in his reports home. Contrast that chastity with Michael Herr’s account o f two Marines at Khe Sanh:

“I mran thry a m ’ got the bread that’d get me herr i f I didn’ have to be here ”

“Horsr Crap,” Mayhrw said. “Day Tripper loves it. He’s short now, but he’s comin’back, ain’t you, Day Trrpper?”

“Shit, m y momma’ll comr over here and pull a tour before Ifuckin’come back.”

It’s not that the American soldier didn’t swear before Vietnam nor that our writers, after Norman Mailer, didn’t use profanity. But American war literature has seldom yielded to the presence of that lean, f u n k y , sad outlaw vernacular that one heard i n Vietnam. Maybe this language found inspiration in the presence there o f the black m a n whose role in earlier wars has usually been peripheral. Now, he was prominent in the fighting and he

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knew it. After nine months on the point, Mickey came home to the world. The

week that he was due to leave, his outfit wasgiven a dangerous assignment and would Mickey stay around for one last f ight? Not likely. So when a medivac helicopter dropped him to pick up a wounded friend, Mickey grabbed the boy and threw them both o n the chopper and o f f they went. Three or four days later, Mickey was in Seattle, having made a transition from jungle to sterile airport that baffled such men again and again. Most had gone to Vietnam as replacements and so were inserted into platoons one by one, seldom with a friend alongside, never knowing the men they would fight with. And most came home this way, without a real pause to unwind and defuse. Mickey found himself in Seattle one midnight, waiting until dawn for a plane east, numb, guilty for having left his friends behind. He already knew that the m a n who had taken his place at the point had been cruelly wounded in that skirmish that Mickey had missed. His family scarcely knew their son, he closed them out, nothing and everything to talk about. But he visited a n uncle who was a minister and that m a n put his arms around Mickey and Mickey started crying and that helped a lot.

Mickey was long out of the army when the ceasefire took place in January, 1973. And even then, there were no uictoryparades, no cheering i n the streets, and there would be no monuments, no heroes, no inspiring battlegrounds. Who has not heard o f Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Tobruk, Anzio, Guadacanal, Midway, Tarawa, Iwo Jima? But who has heard of Dak To, l a Drang Valley, or even Khe Sanh and Tet? The battles in the monsoon happened to be hundreds and thousands of skirmishes overground taken, lost, won, conceded, regained, conceded, year after year. And if Vietnam was the first “living room war,” still the image on T V became as predictable and as anonymous as the history o f American weather which followed the war news. M y Lai, we know, but does anyone remember the name of the village before which Morley Safer stood as Marines burned the huts?

It is evident that the toll taken by Americans who fought i n the war and who survived is appalling. Of the three million who were there (45,000 were killed in action), Cleveland State College psychologist John Wilson speculates that at least one in six o f the survivors and perhaps one in three continues to suffer post-traumatic emotional disorder, the trauma having been their witness of the war: this disorder is often simply called the ‘post- Vietnam syndrome.’ I n previous conflicts, such chaos has cooled soon after the fighting ended, but the post-Vietnam syndrome continues to escalate years after the cease-fire. Because these survivors have had to bear a stigma for having fought in a war that their country sent them to, they have not found the sympathy nor the support that they surely have a right to expect. Public knowledge of this tragic paradox is scant; the federal government has given token allocations for the treatment of this malaise. Such indifference must tell us something about the haste with which Americans have sought to excise the war f rom their collective memory.

Though the literature o f the Vietnam conflict is already extensive (much was written before the war ended) and while many o f us well

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remember those years, I don’t think that any o f us knows exactly what happened to America across that terrible time. Nor do we yet comprehend the cost of the war both then, now and for the future. Perhaps, in time, we will understand. The articles included in this Focus may help. I hope they will alert readers to the need for careful inquiry into the history, character and conduct of our involvement in Vietnam and the impact of that involvement on the “home front,” so that the narrative of that time may become available and so that the meaning may someday be clear.

Victor Howard is Chairman of the Program in American Studies a t Michigan State University.