ED PALM | Perhaps not noble, but not ashamed
By
Ed Palm
Sunday, April 27, 2014
In an especially resonant scene in Tim O’Brien’s surrealistic novel
“Going After Cacciato,” a squad of hitchhiking soldiers who had walked
away from the war in Vietnam are picked up by a member of the
counterculture, a San Diego State dropout, driving a VW van. The
soldiers are actually on a mission to bring back the deserter Cacciato,
but she assumes they are taking a principled stand against what she
characterizes as “The Evil”: “Children getting toasted, the orphans,
atrocities,” as she characterizes it. “God, the guilt must be awful,”
she concludes. After stealing her van and leaving the girl by the
roadside, one of the soldiers concedes that “sometimes I feel a little
guilt.”
That scene encapsulates what to my mind was the most troubling aspect of the anti-war movement. Forget the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book “The Spitting Image,” argues that there is no documentary evidence that returning veterans were literally spat upon. To the contrary, it has been established that pro-war demonstrators spat on anti-war demonstrators. Personally, I don’t doubt that, in isolated cases, it may have happened, but it never happened to me. What I did experience, however, was the pretentious moral empathy of those who, like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, presumed they understood what we had been through and how we should feel about it.
In my last column, I recounted some of the reasons why President Reagan was wrong in affirming that “ours was a noble cause” in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was, first and foremost, a nationalist who had expected us to dissuade France from reclaiming her former colony after World War II. The division of Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was never meant to be permanent, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south was our creation. As Daniel Ellsberg — who leaked the secret history of our involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers — once put it, “We didn’t intervene on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” What’s worse, the means we employed were all out of proportion to the ends we sought in Vietnam. At times, we seemed intent on destroying the country in order to save it.
So how then should those of us who served in Vietnam feel about our service? Should we feel guilty?
The fact of the matter is that our cause was not “noble,” but it wasn’t “evil” either. As former Marine Phillip Caputo puts it in his Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War,” in our day-to-day conduct of the war we may have resembled “those bullying redcoats” of our own revolution. But history is not likely to rank us among the German Wehrmacht, much less the SS, in World War II or even the Army of the Confederacy during our own Civil War. We were not out to subjugate or enslave the Vietnamese. We just thought we knew what was best for them.
Also, like many of us who went to Vietnam, some who fought on behalf of the Third Reich or the Confederacy may have questioned whether their cause was just. But, from time immemorial, soldiers haven’t fought for the cause so much as for one another. As a character in another Vietnam novel puts it, “You look out for me, I’ll look out for you, and we’ll both go home.”
Like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, the ideological purists of my generation — most of whom were risking nothing — would argue that “you’ve just got to separate yourself off from evil.” But, like another of O’Brien’s characters, we would have asked, “What’s evil?” And having grown up where and when we did, for most of us, it was unthinkable to turn our backs on the country that had nurtured us and where we still hoped to make a good life.
The answer, it seems to me, comes from a Marine veteran of the war in Iraq, Phil Klay, who has published a collection of stories inspired by his experiences titled “Redeployment.” In one of the stories, “Prayer in the Furnace,” a chaplain has an epiphany about what the Marines he has counseled are going through in Iraq. Despite the insanity and the horrors of the war, he senses that “this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialistic home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults.”
While so many of our contemporaries sat in self-indulgent safety and comfort, we put ourselves on the line.
Some of us went in believing. Others suspended judgment or, like O’Brien, even went in against their better judgment. But the great majority of us served honorably and proved ourselves to be better than the muddle-headed politicians who had sent us. That’s something to be proud of.
That scene encapsulates what to my mind was the most troubling aspect of the anti-war movement. Forget the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke, in his 1998 book “The Spitting Image,” argues that there is no documentary evidence that returning veterans were literally spat upon. To the contrary, it has been established that pro-war demonstrators spat on anti-war demonstrators. Personally, I don’t doubt that, in isolated cases, it may have happened, but it never happened to me. What I did experience, however, was the pretentious moral empathy of those who, like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, presumed they understood what we had been through and how we should feel about it.
In my last column, I recounted some of the reasons why President Reagan was wrong in affirming that “ours was a noble cause” in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh was, first and foremost, a nationalist who had expected us to dissuade France from reclaiming her former colony after World War II. The division of Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 was never meant to be permanent, and the Republic of Vietnam in the south was our creation. As Daniel Ellsberg — who leaked the secret history of our involvement in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers — once put it, “We didn’t intervene on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” What’s worse, the means we employed were all out of proportion to the ends we sought in Vietnam. At times, we seemed intent on destroying the country in order to save it.
So how then should those of us who served in Vietnam feel about our service? Should we feel guilty?
The fact of the matter is that our cause was not “noble,” but it wasn’t “evil” either. As former Marine Phillip Caputo puts it in his Vietnam memoir, “A Rumor of War,” in our day-to-day conduct of the war we may have resembled “those bullying redcoats” of our own revolution. But history is not likely to rank us among the German Wehrmacht, much less the SS, in World War II or even the Army of the Confederacy during our own Civil War. We were not out to subjugate or enslave the Vietnamese. We just thought we knew what was best for them.
Also, like many of us who went to Vietnam, some who fought on behalf of the Third Reich or the Confederacy may have questioned whether their cause was just. But, from time immemorial, soldiers haven’t fought for the cause so much as for one another. As a character in another Vietnam novel puts it, “You look out for me, I’ll look out for you, and we’ll both go home.”
Like O’Brien’s San Diego State dropout, the ideological purists of my generation — most of whom were risking nothing — would argue that “you’ve just got to separate yourself off from evil.” But, like another of O’Brien’s characters, we would have asked, “What’s evil?” And having grown up where and when we did, for most of us, it was unthinkable to turn our backs on the country that had nurtured us and where we still hoped to make a good life.
The answer, it seems to me, comes from a Marine veteran of the war in Iraq, Phil Klay, who has published a collection of stories inspired by his experiences titled “Redeployment.” In one of the stories, “Prayer in the Furnace,” a chaplain has an epiphany about what the Marines he has counseled are going through in Iraq. Despite the insanity and the horrors of the war, he senses that “this place is holier than back home. Gluttonous, fat, oversexed, overconsuming, materialistic home, where we’re too lazy to see our own faults.”
While so many of our contemporaries sat in self-indulgent safety and comfort, we put ourselves on the line.
Some of us went in believing. Others suspended judgment or, like O’Brien, even went in against their better judgment. But the great majority of us served honorably and proved ourselves to be better than the muddle-headed politicians who had sent us. That’s something to be proud of.
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