The Curse

One of the enduring ironies of the Vietnam War is that the Vietnamese seem to be more "over it" than the Americans, despite having suffered immeasurably more. I had two experiences last week that illustrated yet again to me how deep and destructive and divisive this legacy remains.

In my job as a history teacher, my colleagues and I naturally gather at lunch time to rap about the job, current events, and history. Well, some of us do. Lunch among history teachers is segregated by politics. I eat with the more reactionary crowd, which is due solely to the fact that they're more entertaining than the liberals.

One of the teacher's father is a Vietnam Vet. One of the other teachers (who dines elsewhere) has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of her classroom. This unfortunate congruence of events is a perfect microcosm of our bipolar Vietnam disorder.

The man whose father fought there is unable to acknowledge that his father was sent on a fool's errand (to be charitable). This is understandable to some extent, for when you have skin in the game it makes it a soul-crushing burden to admit that the game was crooked.

The woman who has a poster of Ho Chi Minh on her wall is unable to acknowledge that Ho was, among other things, a murderous tyrant by any measure. This is less understandable, as it relies on the infantile assumption that every fight is pure good versus pure evil. (The Americans were wrong, therefore Ho must have been supremely virtuous.)

At the very least, we can understand how sensitive an issue this is. What is the virtue of putting Ho's picture on the wall of a classroom? Even though American soldiers should have never been in Vietnam, it is at the very least extremely distasteful to idolize a man with so much American blood on his hands, especially for historically naive teenagers.

Also last week, I went to a bachelor party and spent about an hour talking to a Vietnam vet, "Sarge". In the course of our conversations, Sarge said many things.

He said we killed indiscriminately, but also that we fought with one hand tied behind our backs.

He said that our allies were barbarians, and also that our enemies were barbarians.

He implied that he played a part in murdering an incompetent American officer. "Let's just say 14 of us went into that jungle, and 13 of us came back...."

He said that he was spat on when he came home.

Some of these stories were surely true. Some were surely false or exaggerated. And we cannot assume which was which by virtue of identifying the contradictions, because the entire pathetic and tragic enterprise was a contradiction.

The spitting allegation is especially intriguing and a perfect illustration of our Vietnam psychosis. Human psychology tells us that people are fully capable of "remembering" things that never happened and of believing a lie so deeply that it loses its identity as a lie; a lie is only a lie if the liar believes he is lying.

These stories about how people "spit on us" when vets returned from Vietnam really gained traction in the 1980's. Why did it take so long for vets to "remember" these traumatic events? Well, because most of them surely never happened.

So what made these vets imagine that these things had happened? Rambo. And Born on the 4th of July. These movies featured scenes and/or allusions to vets being spit on and, lo and behold, thousands of vets began "remembering" that they had been spit on when they "got off the plane".

The fact that soldiers returing from the war were flown into military airports is but one indication of how unlikely these "memories" are.

Vietnam is such a deep psychological scar that there is not even an agreed-upon set of facts is at play. The psychosis is so deep that there are millions of Americans who will tell you with a straight face that America won the Vietnam War.

When someone writes a history of America in 100 years, it will be even clearer than it is now that Vietnam was the beginning of the end. Before Vietnam, huge swaths of Americans shared a consensus about certain truths and assumptions. There was a general trend of broadening and deepening material affluence and moral inclusion.

But after Vietnam, America became the country it is today, polarized, distressed, aggressive, a place where people can barely agree on what day of the week it is. And when we trace back the root of this discontent, we find ourselves where we were 40 years ago, walking aimlessly through an impenetrable jungle waiting for our demise.