A NAME FOR LOSS

...Think about— yes—Rambo...

...Think about the first thing we hear in Apocalypse Now: the incessant pocketapock-eta of the helicopters...

...It is, simply, a name for loss...

...It can be scant consolation to those poor men suffering unemployment, delayed stress syndrome, or just bad dreams...

...The great truism about Vietnam is that the veterans of that particular obscenity have not been sufficiently honored or 9 August 1985: 441 celebrated but have rather been treated like a national blight...

...Vietnam taught us to shrug — the way you shrug when you hear your cat has been run over in the street, out of recognition of the inevitability of loss — but in teaching us that, it taught us, with luck, the moral perceptions that lie behind the cosmic shrug...

...At the time I write this, Newsweek, Time, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and even, God help us, David Hartman and Phil Donahue have all told us that the war was a national tragedy, that it left scars on the national self-consciousness that may last for decades, and that it is a nightmare from which we can still not awaken and Blah...

...The Vietnam vet, to our common shame, has been largely forgotten in the economy and in our national agencies...

...Vietnam" is not a metaphor for arrogant national ambition, nor a key-word for misplaced national generosity, nor a code-name for national trauma...

...It is the technology of the shrug...

...The point is that the real memorial of Vietnam is not on a field in Washington but in the presence the war exerts on our most intimate dream lives, our popular fantasies...

...and, one hopes, for those who come after, the war in Vietnam is not so much a historical detail as it is a state of consciousness: terrifying, and like all terrifying things, humanizing...

...We always will be...

...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene," Henry says, "beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates...

...and the clash between those two applications of that solemn word is as jarring as the clash between the heroic/noble statuary at the Vietnam Monument and the silent, challenging black slab adjacent to it...

...LBJ, tragically trapped in a retrospective dream of FDR and the High Crusade, was reliving the epic days of 1942 the way George III, in his last days, would sometimes awaken from slumber to shout, "Are my American colonies still loyal...

...Nothing else, and that nothing else would have been brilliant...

...At least in the case of World War II, our public memorials in their grandiosity seem somehow congruent to what both Churchill and Eisenhower referred to as a "Crusade...

...Thomas Magnum of Magnum P.I...

...The tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon does not matter because Saigon was always — and we all knew it — about to fall...

...The public sector has been remarkably unsuspecting of the special agony of those who fought...

...For those of us who lived through it on the twin battlefields of Vietnam and Amerika (remember when it was spelled that way...

...But Marlowe fought in World War I, and carried into this world the bitter virtues of private nobility and private honor and public cynicism that were the legacy also of Hemingway and Fitzgerald...

...nevertheless, it is true that no lasting culture has failed to produce an epic literature based, not on its great victory, but on its definitive defeat, from the Iliad to the Song of Roland to The Charge of the Light Brigade...

...Stallone could bring themselves to agree on a single political issue about the war...

...Blah...

...I do not think Mr...

...We were there...

...The photo of the flag raising at Iwo Jima or the film, The Best Years of Our Lives, can never become cliches because they are testaments to, icons of, a war fought for a truly Grand Cause (although Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon have all articulated the pacifist position that even that war, from the viewpoint of the victim, was pointless and wasteful...

...The Magnum shrug and grin, in fact, is the dramatic equivalent of the black slab monument...

...The fighter plane, the icon of World War II and of Korea, was unidirectional, fast, and sure of purpose...

...Sorry about that" — the Nam phrase that covered everything from a broken latrine to a twenty-four-hour firefight — has passed into the language and may, rightly read, be taken as a theological perception...

...Rambo, Blue Thunder, Magnum P.I., and any number of other films and TV shows feature ex-Nam soldiers who are also involved with the technology of the helicopter...

...One Defense Department White Paper after another insisted that this guerrilla war could be fought as if it were a conventional conflict: they were all written by a group of intellectuals we used to refer to as "McNamara's Band...

...Even the present administration, apparently on the brink of a disastrous foray into Nicaragua — this time we get to fight with the guerrillas — has managed little more than platitudes, paternal back-pats, and the kind of rhetoric Hemingway found so loathsome after Chateau-Thierry...

...For it would have reminded us of another great response to war, Hemingway's epochal diminution of language in the face of the carnage of World War I in A Farewell to Arms...

...And he carries into his world — our world — the sense of disorientation, of gallows humor, of cosmic insouciance, that perhaps best characterize the members of that generation: not a lost generation — as Hemingway described his people — but the generation that shrugs...

...Bruce Springsteen catches the tone too in "Born in the U.S.A...

...Magnum, on the other hand, fought in and was traumatized by Vietnam...

...He is one of the many godchildren of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and a worthy descendant at that...

...There, the protagonist Frederick Henry reflects on the words we usually use to glorify war...

...What I mainly remember is the noise,'' said a colleague of mine who flew helicopters in the Nam (I wasn't there, so I don't have the right to use that phrase, but he was, so he does...

...Coppola and Mr...

...We thought — or wanted to think — that the war in Vietnam was the equivalent of World War II, not just ethically but strategically...

...had a brother at Khe Sanh Fightin' off the Viet Cong: They're still there, He's all gone...

...As originally'designed, it would have been an abstract, triangular, black formation with the names of the war dead inscribed...

...But I know that they do agree about the central spiritual issue of the war: in Apocalypse Now and Rambo, Vietnam is a name for loss, and a name for loss from which we must recover or die...

...But this time it was a little different...

...Think about the Vietnam Monument in Washington...

...and the American Legion so unfortunately missed it...

...Blah...

...But if the public sector has been insensitive, the private sector — the storytellers, daydreamers, musicians, and filmmakers — have guaranteed that the memory of Nam has entered into our consciousness and into the structure of our myths...

...The helicopter — no, the chopper — the icon of Nam, is omnidirectional, ambiguous, and capricious...

...This is not cynicism, but a lyrically humane response to the dehumanization of war when it is fought for Grand Causes...

...Once again — as in all countries — public policy failed to keep pace with that deep level of national self-consciousness which we call, in shorthand, art...

...Noise: you can see only one thing at a time, but you can hear everything at once...

...Think about the outrageous noise level of the Vietnam scenes in The Deerhunter...

...He will not be forgotten in whatever mythologies we leave behind us, for he suffered a kind of universal coming-to-consciousness which is also a universal awakening-to-emptiness which could be the beginning (according to the Christian and Taoist mystics) of spiritual adulthood...

...But that is not the point...

...And nineteen-year-old kids were dying in panic for a reason no one could quite make clear...

...on the other, a craggily heroic sculpture of noble young men alert in the cause of freedom...

...FRANK McCONNELL Commonweal: 442...

...That is not a truism because it is false or boring...

...On the one hand, a large black slab with the names of the dead...

...How could Francis Coppola, Michael Cimino, and even Sylvester Stallone so precisely have caught the spirit of that awful war when the V.F.W...

...so, of course, did Gandhi...

...Of course, the V.F...

...observed in one of his brilliant reviews in Commonweal, the helicopter is the technological icon of the eighties: beautiful, mobile, graceful, and deeply threatening...

...Even our technological myths have been transformed by the Vietnam experience...

...As in Amen...

...And if you do hear everything at once, and if it's loud enough, it can drive you crazy...

...The Vietnam Monument, in its internal dissonance, is a metaphor, and maybe a perfect metaphor, for the psychic dissonance which was and is that disastrous episode...

...it is a truism because it is true, and because like the point of the monument, it is hard to see...

...Perhaps it has to do with the difference between monuments and poems, between the public consciousness as it chooses to pose itself and the cultural consciousness as it is compelled to express itself...

...Vietnam was sometimes referred to as a crusade also...

...It is, I suggest, the entry into maturity of a nation that has heretofore assumed, with all the virtues of adolescence, that it was incapable of doing evil...

...And, since those organizations have a rather better-organized lobby than the poets, they got their wish...

...But one could multiply the examples beyond endurance...

...W. and the American Legion protested the Vietnam Monument as designed, and insisted that there be beside it a heroic statue of a few soldiers...

...In our stories and dreams, Vietnam deserves and has its timeless memorial...

...And, as Colin Westerbeck, Jr...

...Unlike the First, Second, and even Korean Wars, there will never be an appropriate date to celebrate the "end" of the Vietnam War, because it never really ended...

...is a hardboiled detective...