Reflections
Walsh, Lawrence
REFLECTIONS Lawrence Walsh Vietnam for a Thousand Years? Two, three, many Vietnams. That was the miserable future Che Guevara held up for our contemplation, for the people who had lost their way...
...The horrendous dividends of Agent Orange have made a war zone of the human gene pool...
...A January 1974 Senate committee report, heralded hardly at all, placed the 1965-73 death count in South Vietnam alone at 1,435,000...
...The repatriation of bodies has become a disgraceful matter of diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing...
...How fiercely they resist their loss (their widowhood, in the typical case...
...Vietnam has corrupted our affairs two, three, many times over since those Nobel Prize cut-ups Le Due Tho and Henry Kissinger concluded a peace...
...Lyndon Johnson's successors have entertained adventures in the Persian Gulf and Central America, but we have not yet parted from reason so completely as to buy into another extreme and doomed commitment in the revolutionary Back of Beyond...
...Our GIs, like Millet's sowers, would cast quicklime over stacks of the hated Cong, then see to the digging of common graves with bulldozers or call in helicopter transports to sling-load enemy bodies out over the sea for burial in a watery Potter's Field...
...Just for the rash hell of it, let us note that Washington has never been eager to take public measure of what their collision with Pax Americana cost the Vietnamese...
...And we might fill that crypt in Arlington, and get on with the business of making sure we have no more unknown soldiers...
...He came home this summer...
...The Paris Agreements were signed in January 1973, but ten years on, the war refuses to take its place in the rear closet of national consciousness...
...We feed the Russians, and man at least a token diplomatic outpost in Havana...
...But what for them is a toast, sounds like an exotic curse to us...
...The 2,500 missing represent just over 4 per cent of the 57,000-odd U.S...
...His oldest daughter is married to a Japanese...
...We can name our dead...
...Administrations about the coffins they have stockpiled in Hanoi as postwar bargaining chips...
...The Vietnamese...
...If there are, if we fight again, no hole on a Virginia hillside will be up to the job...
...A crypt in Arlington National Cemetery waits for the remains of an unknown soldier killed in Vietnam, but the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia says no, absolutely not, not yet...
...It has gone virtually unreported that Vietnamese graves registration teams looking for bodies of Americans have suffered seven deaths and twelve serious injuries from accidents involving land mines and live antipersonnel bombs...
...It will take a crater several thousand yards across...
...They do not talk of an 'accounting' of the men who have not come home The burial of the dead and a solicitude for the imprisoned are corporal works of mercy well-fixed in the prescriptions of Judeo-Christian morality...
...The Vietnamese had the bad manners to win...
...Private Hartley had been killed charging a German emplacement in the spring of 1945, and had never been found...
...In Beaufort, South Carolina, the aged parents of Joe Hartley finally got to bury their boy, whose remains a German farmer had dug up in the course of spring plowing this year...
...There is no talk in the villages and hamlets of an accounting of those who didn't come home...
...Things have not worked out as Che thought they would...
...These are the men who managed amid the steel and the killing to make love and war, and are now getting to know their children, some for the first time...
...The League women come to us from Homer, Vergil, Bulfinch, from a prehistoric, instinctive tradition of decency and reverence—of vigilance—toward missing warriors...
...Meanwhile, some of those who served under the good general are waiting at airports in Kansas City and Tallahassee for other reminders of Vietnam...
...It really isn't for us to bear a grudge against the Vietnamese...
...The U.S...
...Peasant women throughout Vietnam understand that their husbands and sons were treated, in death, like rodents or weeds...
...This Air Force career officer said he held no grudges against the old enemy...
...In Houston, veterans of German and American infantry units that faced one another in Italy almost forty-year before drank beer together, ate barbecue, and danced with one another's wives...
...How attractive, how oddly compelling their resistance makes them...
...No one in a position to know disputes that the Vietnamese and their Laotian clients are withholding a great deal of information on the number and location of dead Americans...
...In the Bismarck Archipelago, on New Britain, a B-17 pilot found the fuselage of his downed bomber on a heavily forested ridge...
...The women who devote themselves to the League's work say only over their dead bodies will Arlington bury a GI who died mutilated, unseen, unremarked...
...But what can we say about ourselves in all this...
...The only survivor of his ten-man crew, he wound up in a POW camp at Ra-baul, where his Japanese captors starved and abused him for two years...
...It won't go away, Vietnam, not until we explore the redemptive possibilities of peace and forgiveness through reconstruction and reparation, which is what we promised in Paris ten years ago...
...It's a slogan, a casual remark of good cheer spoken at one occasion or another by all Vietnamese...
...Add a box of Vietnam bones to Arlington, and we will truly seal their men—and themselves—from hope, they seem to have decided...
...Peasant women know we treated their dead like weeds or rats...
...They must see something else in their fathers' eyes, something heavier, something very like pain or a remorse past naming...
...Our feelings were deeply hurt...
...An inability to accept the death of a husband or son, absent physical evidence, is understandable...
...It remains to be said that we took a depraved climb up Boot Hill and a descent into baseness in our "disposition" of those we killed...
...In contrast, U.S...
...That was the miserable future Che Guevara held up for our contemplation, for the people who had lost their way in Indochina...
...He's been to Japan several times, and in 1971 went out of his way to reunite there with two of his guards...
...Pursued with a blind venegeance, though, perhaps they are something else...
...You have to ask when our dealings with the Vietnamese will take a summery turn...
...Gregory (Pappy) Boynton, the Marine ace who shot down twenty-eight Japanese war planes over the South Pacific, was the featured speaker at the Zero Fighter Pilots Association's annual meeting in Osaka...
...But then the crater will come ready made: We won't need grave diggers...
...combat deaths in Indochina...
...Its ability to wound and divide after all this time is astonishing...
...Agency for International Development has these figures on war-related disablements dealt the South Vietnamese: a total of 181,000, breaking down to 83,000 amputees, 8,000 paraplegics, 30,000 blinded, 10,000 rendered deaf, and 50,000 "others...
...The number of South Vietnamese who were killed, wounded or made refugees between 1965 and 1973, according to US AID, came to 13,457,822...
...the goofy commando raids planned and already staged by paid Asian thugs in search of GIs tied to stakes in pathetically imagined jungle hellholes...
...We cannot put up a monument to our Vietnam dead without a national brawl...
...This summer, an older generation of Americans reckoned on an older war...
...58,655 were killed or reported "missing...
...We have outdone ourselves in our anticommunist foolishness in making them a pariah state...
...of these, 430,000 were civilian...
...Americans can do anything...
...Viet Nam mudn nam...
...the missing rate in World War II and in the Korean War was 20 per cent of our fatal casualties...
...The Vietnamese have much to answer for in not leveling with successive U.S...
...The Vietnamese have no League of Families...
...Che himself met a violent and pointless end in a firefight with Bolivian militiamen in 1967...
...They have been singled out for a lasting bitterness, and it is little wonder: After we had strewn our national treasure about their country, they went and chased us out...
...There is no Vietnamese counterpart to the National League of Families...
...It is as if anonymous death under arms, in a remote, triple-canopied Central Highlands jungle or in the chop of the South China Sea—-the war had a wild geography—suggests to League survivors the old epistemological saw familiar to undergraduates: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to see or hear it crash down, did it really crash down...
...Vietnam for a thousand years...
...combat casualties for all branches came to 364,449: 155,419 wounded required hospitalization, 150,375 did not...
...Still, Che was unwittingly prophetic...
...The Indochina Resource Center in Washington puts the all-Vietnam fatality figure, solider and civilian, North and South, at two million, and wounded at three million...
...They have at least four sets of remains that defy identification and could properly join those "known but to God," one each from the two world wars and Korea, long ago entombed in a Potomac overlook...
...Today the Defense Department lists only nine soldiers, sailors, and fliers as unaccountably missing in action, and one as a prisoner of war...
...The unspeakable Germans, the barbarous Japanese, the Chinese who fought us to a standstill in Korea—all are our great good friends now...
...The ravings of right-wing Senators and Representatives...
...Not always, not even in 1982, say military forensic specialists in Honolulu...
...Western and African features play through the faces of these lovely "Amerasians," but bewilderment does too...
...There is not a shred of evidence that there is a single American being held against his will in all of Indochina...
...the ridiculous and utterly cynical demands of the Reaganites for a complete accounting of our MIAs when one is simply not possible—none of this can change the facts, as even the Pentagon sees them: Of our 2,500 missing servicemen, all but a handful are "presumed dead...
...the Pentagon admits it has no evidence that any of these ten Americans is alive...
...The crazed combat veteran barricaded in a convenience store with a gun and a hostage or two, demanding who knows what, is a stock figure on the evening news...
...We haven't extended a single technical hand to help the Vietnamese and Laotians defuse the many thousands of unex-ploded bombs that pit the face of Indochina...
...Lawrence Walsh, an associate editor of The Progressive, was a combat cameraman with the Saigon bureau of CBS News in 1968, and worked on the television special, "Hill 943...
...The war came down to a sort of unrequited potlatch...
...William Westmoreland, the hapless "Westy" of yore, wants the courts to make CBS and Mike Wallace restore his reputation, such as it was...
Vol. 46 • December 1982 • No. 12
