Authors: Christopher Buckley
If the millions tend to blur, consider: How many of your friends went to Vietnam?
It wasn’t until the memorial opening that I stood face-to-face with my own guilt and shame. These feelings are, I acknowledge, somewhat illogical. My medical disability is genuine—even as I write this I take periodic hits off my asthma inhaler. Into the bargain I suffer from a rather unpleasant vascular malady called Horton’s cluster headache. I did not dodge the draft, starve myself, shoot off a toe, act psycho, or go to Sweden. So whence this permanent malaise? Go figure. Guilt is a pretty personal affair, and it’s not my business to tell people how they should feel about not having gone to Vietnam. But now that the vets have finally come home and the healing has begun, it may be time for those of us who do have misgivings about not having fought to think, out loud, about the consequences of what we did—and didn’t do.
For those who never left, there is no ceremony and no coming home; if the healing is to be complete, then all the wounds from that war will need healing.
Those of my parents’ generation who missed World War II were devastated by not being part of it. When an uncle of mine talks about being just too young for that war, he uses the word
traumatic
. He once told me that for him and many of his peers Korea came “almost as a relief.”
But it’s hard to compare World War II and Vietnam. A lot of people I know say there’s no good reason to feel guilty about having missed Vietnam. There’s an echo in their arguments from
Henry IV, Part I:
… but for these vile guns,
He would himself have been a soldier.
They say it was a lousy war on every score. They talk about My Lai, body counts, fraggings, Agent Orange, the Phoenix Program, the inability to distinguish enemies from friendlies; about the long list of horrors that seem peculiar to Vietnam. They feel vindicated, and some of them are startled at the question of whether they feel any guilt or shame at having sat out the war. Okay, some say, the “Baby killer!” business did get out of hand. Any movement has its excesses. But it was our movement, our resistance to the war, our not going that convinced the White House and the Pentagon and the Congress to end the war.
True, but six months after the fall of Saigon in 1975 James Fallows examined an entrenched fallacy of the antiwar movement in an article for
The Washington Monthly
called “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” The article had, in the words of the
Monthly’s
editor, Charles Peters, “tremendous impact. It was a turning point in a generation, being willing to open itself up to other than cliché-left truths about Vietnam.”
Fallows described how as a Harvard student he had starved himself down to 120 pounds and affected a suicidal disposition at his Army physical. As the doctor wrote “unqualified” on his form, “I was overcome by a wave of relief, which for the first time revealed to me how great my terror had been, and by the beginning of the sense of shame which remains with me to this day.”
His article was a brilliant and scathing indictment of a system that sent the sons of the working class off to fight its war while allowing the overwhelming majority of the sons of the middle and upper classes to avoid it. One of Fallows’s most penetrating self-criticisms was that while those in the antiwar movement (of which he was a part) convinced themselves they were the “sand in the gears of the great war machine” by burning their draft cards and marching, the real way—the courageous way—to have ended the war would have been to
go
to war.
“As long as the little gold stars,” he wrote, “kept going to homes in Chelsea and the backwoods of West Virginia, the mothers of Beverly Hills and Chevy Chase and Great Neck and Belmont were not on the telephones to their congressmen, screaming
you killed my boy
, they were not writing to the President that his crazy, wrong, evil war had put their boys in prison and ruined their careers. It is clear by now that if the men of Harvard had wanted to do the very most they could to help shorten the war, they should have been drafted or imprisoned en masse.”
Fallows’s argument seems to me airtight; but there are a lot of people who persist in the fallacy, and this has contributed to the anger that many vets understandably feel. Who made the real sacrifice, anyway? Some who never went to Vietnam or into the military did suffer because of it, though the numbers are relatively minuscule: of 209,517 accused draft offenders, 3,250 were imprisoned and 3,000 became fugitives. But, as Paul Starr, author of
The Discarded Army: Vietnam Veterans After Vietnam
, wrote, “the conflict was waged without any privation at home, and the result has been an enormous disproportion of sacrifice. A few have been asked to die; virtually nothing has been asked of everyone else.”
Whatever sacrifices were made at home, the ones made on the field of battle cost more, and it is hard—for me, anyway—to disagree with something James Webb, the twice-wounded, highly decorated Marine and author of
Fields of Fire
, told
Time
magazine apropos the gap between vets and nonvets: “We’re going to have to lead this country side by side. We’re going to have to resolve this. The easiest way is for people who didn’t serve in those years to come off this pretentiousness of moral commitment and realize that the guys who went to combat are the ones who suffered the most. They are also the ones who gave the most.”
The hard, psychological evidence is that what most people who didn’t go to Vietnam feel is neither guilt nor regret but relief. Two years ago the Center for Policy Research submitted an exhaustive nine-hundred-page study to the Veterans Administration and Congress called
Legacies of Vietnam
. Its results, if not surprising, were interesting. It found that only a bare minority of nonveterans, 3.5 percent, feel that staying out of the military had a negative impact on their lives. Thirty-six percent feel it had a positive effect. When asked how staying out of the service had benefited them, the majority said it was by enabling them to pursue their education and career. The next-highest majority said that staying out gave them a competitive advantage over their veteran peers. A veteran, I think, would find this last datum depressing and disheartening.
The question, though, of whether nonvets ought to feel vindicated by the conduct and results of the Vietnam War is, in a sense, beside the point. War is war and combat is combat, and ever since the first jawbone was raised in anger men have felt a terrible need to prove themselves on the field of glory.
“I have heard the bullets whistle,” wrote George Washington about his adventures in the French and Indian War, “and believe me, there is something charming in the sound.” A century later, watching a Federal charge be repulsed at Fredericksburg, Robert E. Lee mused, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” Vietnam may have performed a great national service by demonstrating for my generation the truth of the general’s remark.
The lore is full of stories of those who got out of the war. But for some, not getting into the Army and not getting to Vietnam had nearly as traumatic or profound an impact as being left out of the Normandy landing had on those of another generation. Their stories are far rarer than the other category, but also worth the telling.
One fellow I know is convinced his entire family has been historically cheated. His grandfather was fourteen when World War I ended; his father was fourteen when World War II ended; he was fourteen when the Vietnam War ended.
Robert Owen was thirteen when his brother Dwight was killed in a Vietcong ambush in 1967. (Dwight’s name is inscribed in the lobby of the State Department in Washington, along with those of other recipients of the Secretary’s Award, the State Department’s highest honor.) Robert worshiped Dwight, and the death hit him very hard.
Six years later Owen was a freshman at Stanford, watching television in his dormitory, when the news showed the first batch of POWs setting foot on the tarmac at Subic Bay When Jeremiah Denton, who’d been a prisoner of the North Vietnamese for seven years, stepped to the microphone and said, “God bless America,” Owen suddenly found tears running down his cheeks.
Not long afterward the Marines happened to be on campus recruiting. Owen had not awakened with the idea of signing up, but when he read an ad in that morning’s student newspaper saying,
DON’T BE GOOD LITTLE NAZIS: STOP THE MARINE RECRUITING
, he went down for an interview. The protesters outside were trying physically to prevent anyone from getting in. Owen, who has the build of a pentathlon competitor, shoved his way through. He signed up for the Platoon Leader program. Then came the physical. He flunked it because of a lacrosse injury to his knee. Then began a long, consuming quest.
During the four years following graduation, he tried to get into a half dozen California police departments. Each time, the knee kept him out.
In desperation, he offered to sign insurance waivers. No one would accept such an arrangement.
Nineteen-eighty found him in the same part of the world where Dwight had gone in answer to his own call, on the Cambodia-Thailand border, processing refugees from Pol Pot’s reign of terror for the International Rescue Committee. Then the word came that his father was dying, and he returned home to take care of him. During that ordeal he tried twice to enlist, in the Marines and in the Navy’s SEAL (commando) program, but the Achilles’ knee kept showing up on the X rays. As he was going out the door the Navy doctor suggested he try some other branch of the government. Now he works on Capitol Hill.
After telling the long story one night recently at a Chinese restaurant in Georgetown, he said he’d finally come to a realization that allowed him peace of mind. After all the attempts to put himself in positions where he’d have to prove himself, he’d finally decided that “if and when the test ever comes, I’m going to get my red badge of courage, or die trying.”
In the silence that followed, the fortune cookies came and we cracked them open. His read:
your wisdom has kept you far away from many dangers
.
My friend Barnaby writes from Paris a fourteen-page letter imbued with something like regret, about what not going has meant to him. (Unlike me, he was never called. If he had been, he would have gone.) He mentions a well-known novelist he knows who, when drunk, tells people he was a fighter pilot in Vietnam. (He wasn’t.) But Barnaby understands the novelist’s dilemma and alludes to something Hemingway once said: that if a writer goes to war for a year, he will have enough to write about for the rest of his lifetime.
He remembers a man he met once in a bar in Vermont, a construction worker who’d been stalking deer in the woods for a week with a bow. He invited the man back to his cabin for a drink, and the man told Barnaby about his year in Vietnam as a gunner on river patrol boats. This was, incidentally, three years before
The Deer Hunter
opened.
“It had started to rain heavily as we finished the beer. It was a chilly November. I offered him the couch next to the fire, but he declined, saying he had a tent, and that there was an eight-point buck he’d been closing in on for three days. He thought he could get him at dawn. We shook hands at the door and he stepped out into the cold wet night.
There wasn’t an ounce of fear in him, and I knew that he thought I was soft—I hadn’t been to Vietnam—but he didn’t hold it against me, perhaps because of the way I listened to him talk.”
Barnaby dwells on the word
pledge
. “I knew [at the time] that we had pledged to support that country. While I never liked the phrase, ‘My country do or die,’ I get a lump in my throat when I hear the pledge of allegiance. I think the word pledge is one of the most beautiful in the world.… To stand by a pledge can be an ordeal, and the pledge is only as good as the man who makes it. I will never know how good my pledge is.”
Both Owen and Barnaby were looking for something, obviously: for a test of manhood, a chance to prove themselves under circumstances far more grueling than the challenges civilian, peacetime life throws our way: college exams, job deadlines, love affairs, wind surfing. I think some of the stories we’ve all heard about getting out of the draft or about antiwar demonstrations have a kind of wistful quality to them, as if those telling them are trying to relate ersatz war experiences.
One friend who was in a lot of demonstrations confessed how disappointed he was that he’d never been gassed, “because then it would have been my war too.” Another tells a story of taking multiple doses of LSD before being inducted, which, after an understandably complicated series of events, resulted in his getting off. It’s a funny, and in some ways harrowing, story. It’s his war story.
There’s an undercurrent of envy here. I certainly feel it, at least. I have a number of friends who served in Vietnam. One was with Special Forces, another was in Army intelligence, another with the CIA. They all saw death up close every day, and many days dealt it themselves. They’re married, happy, secure, good at what they do; they don’t have nightmares and they don’t shoot up gas stations with M-16s. Each has a gentleness I find rare in most others, and beneath it a spiritual sinew that I ascribe to their experience in the war, an aura of
I have been weighed on the scales and have not been found wanting
.
The word
veteran
comes from the Latin for
experienced
. But it’s not the same experience we gain by passing through the gradual, attenuated rites of passage of lives measured out with coffee spoons. In his extraordinary book about his experiences in Vietnam,
A Rumor of War
, Philip Caputo wrote, “We learned the old lessons about fear, cowardice, courage, suffering,
cruelty, and comradeship. Most of all, we learned about death at an age when it is common to think of oneself as immortal. Everyone loses that illusion eventually, but in civilian life it is lost in installments over the years. We [in Vietnam] lost it all at once, and, in the span of months, passed from boyhood through manhood to a premature middle age.”