I was too young to go to Vietnam.
The war ended when I was a junior in high school. I was one of the first American boys to come of age without having to register for the draft.
I grew up in a military family, but I don't know exactly what my father did in the war. A lot of the time he was stateside; we lived on an Air Force base in southern California in the late 1960s. For a couple of years he was gone for long stretches, six months or more, to "Southeast Asia." Later, when he was dying, I found out this meant mostly Thailand, but he'd been in Cambodia, too. He wouldn't tell me much more. He told me about a cobra that attacked a Jeep he was riding in; that once a mission was scuttled because some out-of-the-loop general noticed a group of men that included my father disembarking from a Grumman C-2 Greyhound in mufti and longish hair and made inquiries.
It was also in my father's last days that I found out he wouldn't have let me go to what he had finally decided was an unnecessary and wrong-headed war.
It is a war that dominated my childhood; it is embedded in one of my earliest memories from 1963, some months before the murder of John F. Kennedy. We were taking one of those seemingly interminable car trips my family did in those days, from upstate New York to visit my mother's folks in Georgia. It was dusk, and the radio dial, which I still see clearly, was faintly glowing undersea green. I wasn't paying attention until the news reader intoned the words "civil war."
I had a vague notion of the War Between the States, and I was alarmed that maybe the conflict wasn't as settled as I thought it was. "Are they still fighting the Civil War?" I asked my father.
He explained to me that the fighting was a long way off, in another country, on the other side of the world. A place called Vietnam. He didn't mention that Americans were there. I can't imagine that he had any idea how much the place would come to matter to us all over the next decade.
The conflict in Southeast Asia was one of the longest, and aside from the War Between the States, the most divisive in our country's history. Between July 1957 and May 1975, more than 2.7 million Americans served in the combat zone. More than 300,000 were wounded; more than 75,000 were permanently disabled. There are still a couple of thousand officially listed as missing in action.
Forty-two years after the fall of Saigon the war remains problematic for Americans. It was a political and military failure, a misadventure of devastating magnitude. By now, the conventional approach to the war is to regard it as a mistake, a black chapter in American history. While we can honor the men and women who served there, the war itself remains a source of national embarrassment and even shame.
Any visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., cannot help but notice the array of items left at the foot of the monument. On any given day they include flags and flowers, enlistment certificates and unopened C-rations, dog tags, love letters and poems. There are also medals, battle decorations--Bronze and Silver Stars, yellow campaign ribbons, Purple Hearts. It is the medals that are most confounding. Some were no doubt left in disgust because of the futility of the war, others as simple patriotic offerings to honor the fallen. Most were probably left in an ambiguous gesture, a palpable sign of the confusion of those lucky enough to live through a time their friends could not.
The artifacts at the memorial are an outward manifestation of the confusion Americans still feel about the war that played itself out on our television sets. Unresolved, bitter debates still haunt the country; the image of the Vietnam veteran as a burned-out, damaged and dangerous figure has become an unfortunate part of our national consciousness.
The war has grown remote enough for us to mine it for entertainment purposes. The 1980s were filled with Rambo-type movies that essentially replay the jungle drama with one significant change: "This time we get to win."
That is still the crucial problem most of us have with Vietnam--we lost. And the unresolved debate over whether we could have won, or how and why we lost, is an impossibly circular, fruitless pursuit; the questions themselves both mask and represent ideological passions.
The failure to win, the collapse of the previously undefeated, untied American military machine to prevail in Vietnam, is usually attributed to a failure of nerve on the part of politicians and bureaucrats. But even in retrospect it is difficult to imagine how the United States could have won anything other than a pyrrhic victory against an often invisible guerrilla enemy. The literature of Vietnam, novels by former grunts such as Tim O'Brien and Larry Heineman, seems to make it clear that the ordinary soldier's primary concern was not winning the war but staying alive and relatively sane.
I have been watching The Vietnam War, an 10-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick which began airing on PBS Sunday. Although I generally enjoy Burns' work, I'm suspicious of his populism--the degree to which his work seems to champion American exceptionalism--and the illusion of comprehensiveness it sometimes provides. It's not his fault that his fans seem to take his vision as definitive, but the truth is the Civil War, baseball, jazz and Huey Long are too large and complex to be corralled by any single filmmaker, no matter how genial and sincere.
That said, The Vietnam War is a devastating and hypnotic achievement. It's a at once a broad survey and a core sampling of personal memories, a story about our past that throws our present into horrifying relief. It is in some ways a repudiation of American specialness while serving to rehabilitate the image of the young Americans who fought and killed and died in those Asian jungles so long ago.
It is an act of contrition that presents an opportunity for, God help us, healing.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/19/2017