Why Were We In Vietnam?

...In this respect, Hollywood is motivated less by sociology or politics than by a particularly debased version of the adversary impulse that characterizes modern literature...

...By contrast, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was released in 1948, just three years after V-J Day, and was quickly followed by James Gould Cozzen's Guard of Honor (1949), J ame J ones' From Here to Eternity (1951), and Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951...

...and enlisted men often regarded their own officers as the real enemy, to the point where "fragging" became a significant problem...

...Yet this much is inescapable: The war that produced so much in the way of political turmoil has so far yielded very little in the way of art—or even popular culture...

...With this kind of attitude shaping our literary culture, the time had long since passed when the army and certainly the war were readily accessible to one who had not experienced them...

...The heart has reasons which the reason sometimes does not wish to face...

...Such wisdom constitutes intellectual responsibility, a responsibility that Chomsky and company continually betrayed in their writings on the war in Vietnam...

...Richard Rovere in Partisan Review, with a response by Irving Kristol (1952...

...t Ordinarily, "serious" writers and dramatists would be eager to step in where Hollywood dared not tread...

...1967) and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award in 1974—even though neither actually deals directly with the war...

...Obviously, Gold could be generalizing from a particularly unrepresentative sample of writing...

...t Since Wayne's disastrous epic was the only Hollywood feature made about the war while it was still being fought (apart from The Losers, a low-budget "biker," in which the Hell's Angels rather improbably rumbled with the Vietcong), film historians will undoubtedly have a great deal of fun trying to interpret all the disguised allegories of the period: Richard Brooks' The Professionals, Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid, and all of Sam Peckinpah's Westerns will certainly merit scrutiny...

...Even as recently as this year, an insane former combat pilot flew a bomb-laden blimp to disaster in Black Sunday...

...Books like Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War (praised by Solotaroff in the review quoted), Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, and Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers (to cite only three of the most recent best-sellers), and documentary films like Hearts and Minds (winner of an Oscar in 1975), Far from Vietnam, In the Year of the Pig, and Hoa Binh, do not offer the sort of understanding provided by art...

...although the story begins in Saigon, it ends in Southern California, by way of San Francisco...

...Some may hold that the Soviet Union is such a threat, even a far more dangerous and vastly more powerful threat in 1977 than it was in 1952...

...not of combat but of what might be called the war ethos—the cult of violence for Mailer, and of drugs for Stone...

...With the noteworthy exception of David Rabe's drama trilogy (The Basic Training of Paulo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers), there has been a depressing dearth of significant art dealing with the war...

...Both turned out to have been bogeymen, compared to realities...

...The American Spectator November 1977 17...

...Of course, if we are seeking relief from the burden of conscience rather than an understanding of the truth, then the numbing effect of the new journalism is certainly to be preferred to the potentially disquieting power of art...

...According to one, many Americans are puzzled by the relationship of liberals to Communism, and liberals should prevent that...

...Some critics have even gone so far as to suggest that fiction is an inadequate means of capturing the reality of the American experience in Vietnam...

...In answer to the question posed by his title, Mailer spends 140-odd pages describing a bear hunt in Alaska...

...he is the Everyman who has always figured in dramas about war and the military—from Woyzeck to Gomer Pyle...

...If, indeed, one wishes to understand major intellectual struggles even today, one must cope with such episodes as one that occurred in the year 1952...

...Instead they permit a guilt-ridden complicity in which "facts" replace insights, and the accumulation of endless details substitutes for the imaginative transformation of experience...

...We have learned by 1977 to think poly-centrically...

...The struggles between Maoist China and the Soviet Union are vivid in consciousness, and the countless crosscurrents in that vast part of the world we roughly refer to as "communist" (lower case, these days) are well known to us...

...Hollywood has not so much discovered the war as rediscovered social realism...

...What is significant about these two novels is the implicit suggestion that the Vietnam war is accessible through the experience Robert Asahina is managing editor of The Public Interest and film critic for the New Leader...

...and Coming Home, starring Jane Fonda (!) as a social worker involved in the reorientation of returning soldiers.* This crop of what are alleged to be war films can be put in the proper perspective by imagining that the majority of movies about World War II were simply variations on the theme of The Best Years of Our Lives...

...More importantly, in World War II the army served as almost a model "melting pot...

...Indeed, the very strength of the key metaphor in Streamers—that of parachutists suspended between heaven and earth—is grounded in the play's setting: an unspecified stateside jump school, where the airborne trainees are caught between civilian life and combat...

...Heller, however, is a notoriously slow worker...

...For neither McCarthyism nor Communism is, in 1977, the relevant name for what stirs our deepest anxieties...

...A researcher into the debate circa 1952 will be struck by how old-fashioned the references to "Stalinism" or even to "Communism" now seem...

...Yet the question "Why were we in Vietnam...

...Such an exercise brings a profound feeling of sadness, that so much energy has been wasted and that events are again stirring memories along ancient battlelines...

...For example, in a recent review of Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters, one of the very few fictional accounts of the war to surface in a decade, Ivan Gold glumly concluded that Vietnam is "novel-proof...

...They and, of course, Calley, who confirmed the worst...

...Moreover, in the meantime, writers for television and the movies had quickly turned the hapless homecoming soldier into a comically absurd caricature: For several years, a maladjusted, usually drug-addicted, and often homicidal ex-G.I...

...The offending sentences, quoted so often since, run as follows: There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist...

...It may be useful to head off cyclic repetition by conceiving of the problem in a new way...

...After all, as has often been noted, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was not published until 16 years after the end of World War II...

...and it loses all its rights in the unlimited horizon of 'historical perspectives' and 'total' demands...

...Kristol, in a word, was trying to commend a more appropriate strategy for defeating McCarthy, a new way of drawing the battleline...

...Rolling Thunder, written by Paul Schrader, who was responsible for the screenplay of Taxi Driver...

...Eight years of war and four years of peace have inspired little else besides Robin Moore's egregious The Green Berets (1965...

...and (2) an errant characterization of "the spokesmen for American liberalism...

...The issue, so we are often told, is whether McCarthyism or Communism was the more serious menace...

...Had Vietnam not been such an unpopular war, this internal military strife would have been less acute (although it is unlikely that it would have ceased altogether, given the widespread social turmoil of the decade...

...and Irving Howe in a book review in the New York Times (1976...

...racial conflict split the ranks...

...A researcher can hardly avoid concluding that there were strong passions in the air awaiting some such sentences, ready to fix upon them as an excuse, an occasion, a battle cry...

...the very word "Vietnam" does not occur again until the last sentence of the book...

...If "reality" were indeed limited to the anti-war movement, it is not surprising that artists should have ignored the war itself...

...In marked contrast, the American army in Vietnam was severely divided: The gulf between "lifers" and draftees grew to enormous proportions...

...Robert Asahina Why Were We in Vietnam...

...Some astonishingly (and no doubt unconsciously) revealing testimony to this effect was recently offered by Theodore Solotaroff, reflecting on the limits of his moral sensibility during the Vietnam era: I quickly went back to viewing the war through the abstracting lens of my politics, which easily converted the soldiers, marines, and pilots I saw on TV into the sacrificial dupes or violent zealots of Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Kissinger...

...In an exchange of correspondence in Commentary in 1968, Irving Howe found two implications here that he did not like: (1) an ugly comparison between McCarthy and the spokesmen for American liberalism...

...About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing, and with some justification.' Even on their face, these sentences bear two interpretations...

...To be sure, those works varied widely in literary merit, but no war novel comparable even to the least of them has yet emerged from Vietnam...

...Perhaps the war novel or 16 The American Spectator November 1977 war movie or war drama never really was an interesting or enlightening genre: After all, The Red Badge of Courage is a great novel about war, not merely a great "war novel" (or "anti-war novel," for that matter...

...The situation was much different, to take the obvious example, in World War II...

...In effect, at least for some writers, the true story of the war is to be found on the home-front rather than the battleground...

...With the exception of Robert Altman's M`A"S*11, in which Korea functioned as a surrogate for Vietnam, in the 1960s and early 1970s Westerns were the closest thing to Vietnam, war movies...

...The Vietnam veteran came to play such a peculiar part in popular melodrama partly because of the pressure brought against the networks and producers by minority groups around 1970, which resulted (at least temporarily) in the near disappearance of black, Hispanic, and even American Indian criminals from the screen...

...The only forthcoming releases actually set in Vietnam are Francis Ford Coppola's long-awaited Apocalypse Now, supposedly inspired by Conrad's Heart of Darkness (which was also the inspiration for Stone's Dog Soldiers), and starring Marlon Brando...

...The homefront figures even more prominently in Sticks and Bones, the story of a soldier, blinded in combat, whose homecoming shatters the middle-class complacency of his family...

...By at least one interpretation—the one its critics Michael Novak is Ledden Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University...

...Kristol's offending sentences end, it will be recalled, with this • Not counting citations in Commentary in the May and June issues, these sentences are quoted by: Irving Howe in Partisan Review (1954...

...Deer Hunter, featuring Robert De Niro (who portrayed a crazed ex-Marine in Taxi Driver last year) as a veteran struggling to make a living as a steelworker...

...The search for art that sheds light on Vietnam might be misguided...

...And the title of Stone's brilliant tour de force refers not to infantrymen but to narcotics smugglers...

...Art is born out of experience, and the experience of our artists, as members of the intellectual class, was primarily of being against the war...

...make, naturally—these sentences are not altogether happy...

...The only servicemen who were real to me were the veterans who opposed the war...

...Class antagonisms (not to mention racial hostilities) certainly did not disappear, but a common purpose united soldiers of widely varying backgrounds...

...Some mention must be made, however, of Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam...

...Norman Mailer, for one, went straight from Harvard to the South Pacific: The Naked and the Dead sprang from his experiences with the 112th Cavalry in the Philippines and with the occupation forces in Japan...

...Liberals may believe that they alone understand Communism and thoughtfully oppose it...

...Immediately after this line come the offending sentences...

...Lillian Hellman also alludes to Kristol's article in Scoundrel Time (1976...

...Then the war ended and I soon forgot about it, except to the extent that the Watergate revelations offered an oblique sense of retributive justice...

...Unfortunately, the play suffers—especially now, in retrospect, six years after its premiere—from Rabe's inability to elevate a theme that is constantly in danger of sinking into banality: the plight of the returning veteran...

...Michael Novak McCarthyism, Still the Life of the Party To ask whether McCarthyism or Communism posed the more serious threat in 1932 obscures the real issue, namely, the failure of liberals and socialists to acknowledge profound errors of moral ana'political judgment...

...He is saved by his art from the self-indulgence that has tended to characterize journalistic accounts of the war that have proliferated in the absence of art...

...It is to their discredit that they did not even try...

...They are nonetheless mistaken," Kristol writes, "and it is a mistake on which McCarthy waxes fat...

...The artistic failing of Rabe's play is that the main character more often resembles the latter than the former...

...It must be remembered that John Wayne, of all people, had a great deal of difficulty convincing the studios to produce his 1968 screen adaptation of The Green Berets...

...seemed to be responsible for every felony perpetrated on the streets of San Francisco or in Kojak's Midtown South precinct...

...Moreover, screenwriters were (and are) typically inclined to picture criminals sympathetically as victims of their circumstances —and what could be more conducive to crime than an unjust war waged by a sick society...

...The locus classicus of 1952 is an essay in the March Commentary by Irving Kristol, around which an unusually large correspondence grew up then, and a quite passionate debate still simmers today...

...These conflicts are astutely represented in Streamers...

...Considering how skittish Hollywood has typically been regarding "controversial" topics, it is not surprising that Vietnam should be discovered in such a perverse fashion, a decade after the fact...

...November 1977 15 the Vietnam war, it is striking that most of the movies to be released in the next few months are concerned not with the horrors of combat but with the anguish of homecoming: Heroes, with Henry Winkler as an ex-G.I...

...and Sidney J. Furie's The Boys in Company C, with a cast of .unknowns...

...Likewise, when Megan Terry's Viet Rock first appeared, it was erroneously criticized by both the Right (for being unpatriotic) and the Left (for being insufficiently radical in its protest against the war...

...Forced to come up with another minority group to slander, Hollywood rather improbably hit upon the disgruntled veteran—who always (somewhat unrealistically) turned out to be a WASP...

...But, almost to a man, they did not—in what amounts to a collective failure of nerve, which needs some explaining...

...It is impossible to know what to expect from either...

...We should not expect art to clarify partisan issues, for its significance lies in illuminating the general by way of the particular...

...Or else they became journalists, like Robert Stone, who was an anti-war foreign correspondent in Vietnam...

...They focussed it...

...Around no issue have family arguments among intellectuals been more intense for sixty years than around what position ought to be taken up concerning Communism...

...I think the most obvious reason is also closest to the truth: For the most part, they simply did not belong to the class that bore the burden of fighting the war...

...But Pavlo Hummel is not just a "grunt" in Vietnam...

...This shift in focus is certainly evident in Rabe's much acclaimed trilogy...

...But contemporary emphasis would scarcely be on some ideological mystique, on some spiritual virus, or on networks of domestic espionage that might attack this nation "from within...

...Read in context, however, these sentences do not support the damaging interpretation...

...Yet Rabe's trilogy, while rooted in experience, is revealing in a somewhat different respect: The more it approaches the level of serious art, the less it specifically has to do with Vietnam...

...During the Vietnam era, naturally, Mailer was well into middle age, but his younger counterparts in the counterculture, indulging in the luxury of draft deferments, were more likely to be marching in protest than in combat...

...But the net effect of all the discord was to make the American soldier a foreigner to his own countrymen...

...Yet those with the most personal knowledge of both were the least able or the least inclined to undertake the task of transforming their experiences into art...

...Perhaps this is as it should be: The claim to aesthetic legitimacy is made at the expense of political relevance...

...For example, although there has been a great deal of publicity this fall about Hollywood's recent "discovery" of The American Spectator...

...Both Streamers and Sticks and Bones are set entirely in the United States, and only about a third of the action in The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel takes place overseas...

...By the mid-1960s, Mailer himself had long since abandoned fiction for his own peculiar brand of personal journalism...

...The debate of 1952 was often described by partisans on both sides as a debate between anti-Communists and anti-antiCommunists...

...When The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel was first produced in 1972, it was mistakenly (and, in retrospect, excessively) praised as a powerful protest against the war by critics who were eager to exaggerate its virtues merely because of their own political sentiments...

...History, Chiaromonte knows, is a savage god, one that runs roughshod over the rights of particular persons while never ceasing to proclaim that it is ultimately for the People...

...If we grasped that clearly, we would surely have clearer insight into what divides us today...

...Historians will no doubt have countless answers in the coming years...

...To interpret a mischievous text, one examines its proximate context...

...So if the debates of 1952 still go on, despite language that exaggerated or masked the true nature of the struggle, what was then at stake...

...The classic article by Kristol is called " 'Civil Liberties,' 1952A Study in Confusion...

...Hollywood's brand of realism, of course, has always been pretty far removed from the real world...

...Two sentences in that article are the focus of that controversy...

...In the sense in which "Communism" was perceived to be a threat by all the participants in the debates of the 1950s—and one should emphasize that all parties to the debates were explicitly antiCommunist—"communism" is not perceived to be a threat today...

...But artists could have made an important contribution to the process of understanding, while the war was being waged and the question was most urgent...

...Michael Harrington in Dissent (1955...

...In those sentences which come before, Kristol denounces as "a calamitous error" the belief "that because a vulgar demagogue lashes out at both Communism and liberalism as identical," it is therefore necessary to protect Communism in order to defend liberalism...

...his book was at least eight years in the writing alone...

...Emphasis today falls upon well-known laws of national aggrandizement, imperial purpose, and military expenditure...

...Attacking what he called "the widespread habit among our contemporaries of judging every problem concerning social reality in terms of history," Chiaromonte said that "human existence, as we know, is uncertain, relative, transient...

...Rabe is also exceptional in not falsifying his experiences in the process of making them public...

...It could be argued, of course, that simply not enough time has passed for the fruits of the creative processes to appear...

...According to another, McCarthy is clear, but liberals are suspect...

...The sentences immediately before and after the quoted sentences thicken Kristol's meaning considerably...

...Regarding the article in question, one does not have to look far...

...Perhaps more important, though, screenwriters are simply always in search of a new outsider, a new alienated anti-hero, whose plight can be exploited for the purpose of yet another critique of bourgeois society...

...But this must have been a smokescreen...

...The war that produced so much in the way of political turmoil has yielded very little in the way of art, Nearly four years after the signing of the cease-fire agreement and a dozen years after the escalation of American involvement, the Vietnam war has still almost entirely escaped the attention of our playwrights, novelists, and moviemakers...

...Yet, as Stanley Kauffmann has noted, both sorts of objection were beside the point: To the extent that it was theatrically valid, it was politically "irrelevant...

...Irving Howe in Commentary, quoting Michael Harrington, and then in an exchange with Irving Kristol (1968...

...is certainly worth asking...

...The sentences did not cause a split...

...An exception, of course, was Rabe, who is a Vietnam veteran...

...readjusting to civilian life...