The Last Word
Davis, Rod
THE LAST WORD Rod Davis Victims of Our Noble Cause What will we do with all those crazy Vietnam veterans? Of the 8.5 million who served in the military during the Vietnam era, of the 2.7 million...
...And at the very avant of the garde we have the meditative symposiums at which the Concerned and the Learned assemble to ruminate on why we can't put this sordid business behind us...
...I was under the impression I was there to stop the flow of communism," he recalls...
...What the hell, there are no jobs, there's this Agent Orange sickness poisoning the semen and disfiguring the babies, there are the nightmares hardly alleviated by the drugs and sauce, and there are the words that evoke the scenes of horror, horror, horror, and nobody with whom to share those words except the other vets...
...Not once at the Salado conference did anyone ask—not once in the current Display of Concern does anyone ask—why we believed we had to stop communism...
...It was what made him enlist...
...The average age of the Vietnam-era GI was nineteen, so most of the veterans are now just hitting the life-cycle shakeout that besets Americans in their early thirties...
...For three days, noted psychiatrists, historians, military experts, and policymakers mingled with antiwar poets, journalists, and ordinary ex-grunts, attempting to "understand the Vietnam experience...
...It is much easier to remember the war for the melodrama of its denouement than for the nature of its causes...
...Having failed to find warm places in the democracy for which they proffered their lives and honor, the veterans are disconsolate...
...We have Agent Orange testing programs (which don't even include blood or urine sampling...
...We have no desire to look into the mendacity of our "national interest" when it is so much easier to pry open the broken hearts of the good workers who set out, as ordered, to protect that national interest and went sick and sour in the task...
...And now, as if things weren't bad enough, the living casualties—the uniformed and nonuniformed of an entire generation—are being treated to a new national determination to Understand Vietnam...
...But if you put the horror into words, even with comrades, the thing lies thick in the air, and you would rather crawl into a hole and get high forever than have it on you again...
...Understanding Vietnam proved as elusive as winning Vietnam, and for similar reasons...
...Make way for the freak show...
...Until that shift in Understanding Vietnam is made—Noam Chomsky predicted in 1975tit would never be made—the whole process is an insult...
...Across the country, various academic, professional, and governmental entities are exerting themselves to show their concern for the veterans of the war...
...Of the 8.5 million who served in the military during the Vietnam era, of the 2.7 million who took part in the war, of the 1.6 million who engaged in combat, fewer than 58,000 had the grace to die...
...The shame resides in the country, and it is political, not personal...
...Ronald Reagan wasn't wrong when he described it as a noble cause...
...Rapidly moving in on this reflective terrain are the intellectuals, the second-generation best-and-brightest, who have been through the hubris, now freely acRod Davis, former editor of The Texas Observer, teaches English at the University of Texas in Austin...
...There is the nice irony of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, where the intelligentsia once again showed its contempt for the GI...
...We have a growing cottage industry of military histories and rehashes...
...knowledge that the war was a Bad Thing, and are eager to bind the wounds...
...The cost was covered by grants totaling $45,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and five Texas philanthropic groups...
...The Vietnam vet is even celebrated on television, from Magnum P.I...
...After I was there, the question was could I survive...
...On the last day, though the conferees had heard veterans with ranks from Specialist/4 to General cry for absolution from what they perceived to be a performance failure, it was possible for Philip Gey-elin, Vietnam-era director of The Washington Post's editorial page, to say of the war: "It wasn't all good...
...Only then will we will heal our veterans because only then will their holy craziness have been absorbed and diluted enough to make us all sane...
...After observing that decade of barbarous technological carnage, anyone who can still conceal guilt behind good-idea-gone-awry verbiage cannot possibly address the problems of the men and women who have already paid too high a price for delusion...
...Newsweek has already issued a ten-year retrospective on the war (American media think of history in base ten), and Sunday newspapers are crammed with thoughtful reflections (What did it all mean...
...The fashionable thing is simply to stop thinking about what got us into the war—who wants to be accused, after all, of suffering from "post-Vietnam syndrome"?—and talk instead about tidying up the mess...
...John Contee, a twice-wounded foot-soldier who now works as a counselor in Houston, understands the delusion...
...This kind of Cold War liberalism has particularly pernicious implications for veterans...
...neither was it all bad...
...Only when the imaginary gardens of the national mind are filled with the real bones of almost 58,000 dead Americans and more than two million dead Vietnamese, Kampucheans, Thais, Laotians, Montagnards, and other victims of our Noble Cause—stopping communism— will the truth of Vietnam be revealed to America...
...One such conference was held not long ago at Salado, Texas, a rustic town a few hours' drive from the Hill Country to which Lyndon Johnson, politically broken by the war, retired in 1969...
...Veterans may be pardoned if they resent being treated as dumb suckers who couldn't do what Kennedy and McNamara and Bundy and the others so brilliantly envisioned...
...What veterans did was not their shame, it was their job...
...to Hill Street Blues, though mostly as a homicidal maniac whose main social utility is as a dramatic device—deus ex machina...
...Even if we add the 364,449 who were injured, what we have left is a rather large contingent of exquisitely honed gladiators who mill around with their unseemly problems amid the amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesty...
...Despite an often fascinating review of the history of our involvement, despite penetrating analyses of the causes of post-stress syndrome in Vietnam vets, despite some emotional exchanges between veterans and such former policymakers as Walt Whitman Rostow, the conference managed studiously to avoid the most important question—the one every GI died or is dying to have answered: Why did you send us...
Vol. 47 • February 1983 • No. 2
