Wry Martinis (37 page)

In that passage, they learned something very hard to obtain outside the battlefield: the “communion between men [in infantry battalions] is as profound as any between lovers. Actually, it is more so. It does not demand for its sustenance the reciprocity, the pledges of affection, the endless reassurances required by the love of men and women. It is, unlike marriage, a bond that cannot be broken by a word, by boredom or divorce, or by anything other than death. Sometimes even that is not strong enough. Two friends of mine died trying to save the corpses of their men from the battlefield. Such devotion, simple and selfless, the sentiment of belonging to each other, was the one decent thing we found in a conflict otherwise notable for its monstrosities.”

At the heart of Dr. Johnson’s saying that “every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier” are a great many childish, mud- and blood-splattered romantic notions and dreams of glory. In the context of what Caputo is saying, maybe the best reason for agreeing with the doctor is that by not putting on uniforms, we forfeited what might have been the ultimate opportunity, in increasingly self-obsessed times, of making the ultimate commitment to something greater than ourselves: the survival of comrades.

The fragging stories blurred an important realization: if anything is clear about the ethos of the American soldiers in Vietnam, it is that they weren’t fighting for democracy, or against communism, but for each other.

Dr. Arthur Egendorf, a clinical psychologist now in private practice who served with Army intelligence in Vietnam and who was a principal author of the congressional study
Legacies of Vietnam
, says that for non-veterans of Vietnam, the effects of not going are “mostly negligible, not the sort of thing to talk about as mental illness. Maybe some feel actual guilt, but mostly what we see is a kind of vague malaise.” Guilt—severe guilt—is still having nightmares thirteen years later because, as in the case of one of Egendorf’s friends, your unit was wiped out while you were on a reconnaissance patrol. The man in question blocked from conscious recollection the names of his friends who were killed in the attack: “We went to the Vietnam memorial together, and he literally could not mobilize
himself to touch the wall because he was so ashamed of not being able to remember the names of those who died. Now,” says Egendorf, putting all this in sobering perspective, “
that’s
guilt.”

But he does have “an impression” about the impact not going had on the generation that in the main didn’t.

“If there is one major strand,” he says, “that is played out among the nonveterans, it’s this whole thing about nonengagement, noncommitment. Service got a bad name in the last war. People who didn’t serve felt vindicated for keeping clean. And the main cost of all that is much more social than in any obvious sense individual. You see a declining trust in public institutions of all sorts. It’s a suspicion that
I got away with something
. There’s no neurotic guilt, but there is a lingering need to cover up and justify a posture of nonengagement. It means that there are a lot of lives that are less vital because of it.”

Egendorf is not at all critical of those who, as he says, took a stand against the war on political or moral grounds; in fact, he admires the courage of those who undertook nonviolent protest.

On the other hand, he says that in the course of undertaking the
Legacies
survey, he began to find that a majority of Vietnam-generation males evinced attitudes he describes as “turned-off, who cares, don’t count on me.”

“
That’s
where the main cost lies. The form of the war experience becomes ‘I got off scot-free, ha ha ha.’ And that is
not
a, posture on which you can build a creative, constructive, determined, self-respecting life. Those kinds of virtues come out of a sense of having given oneself, having served, standing for something. Caring enough, putting your neck out.

“So when you have deliberately not done those things—and the Zeitgeist was to justify pulling out, cover your duff—then you have people fooling themselves about how to make it in the world. They bullshit themselves into thinking the great virtue is staying aloof, being noncommittal. But that’s precisely what
doesn’t
work. What works is to commit yourself to what you care about.”

Egendorf has two last observations on all this. The first is that this guilt—or malaise—is a waste of time. It doesn’t do anyone any good. “At first,” he says, “it seems like a badge of worthiness.
At least I’m suffering
. It can lead to a kind of belated hero worship [of vets]. But that’s useless, really, and ultimately self-destructive. What we need to muster for vets is dignity and respect. We’re all partners in a prearranged marriage.
There’s no illusion of romance, but we do need to have respect for each other. And if we’re going to have that, we’re going to need forgiveness—for ourselves.”

The other is that “people called the shots as best they could at the time. It’s not an excuse, but a question of recognizing that the dumb thing we all do is blame ourselves for not having known what it took some crucial experience to teach us. Guilt becomes a kind of booby prize. What we need much more than that is a fresh look at what now calls for commitment.”

Whether it’s guilt or malaise, what I do know for certain is that if someday I have a son and he asks me what I did in the Vietnam War, I’ll have to tell him that my war experience, unlike that of his grandfather, consisted of a hemorrhoid check.

Most people I know who avoided the war by one means or another do not feel the way I do, and I’m in no position to fault their reasons or their justifications.

But I do know some others who are still trying to come to terms with all this. And sometimes it comes to the surface, a sense of incompleteness …

“I didn’t suffer with them. I didn’t watch my buddies getting wiped out next to me. And though I’m relieved, at the same time I feel as though part of my reflex action is not complete.”

 … of an unpaid debt …

“I haven’t served my country. I’ve never faced life or death. I’m an incomplete person. I walk by the memorial and look at the names and think, ‘There but for the grace of God …’ ”

 … of how easy it was …

“The dean once told me, ‘You know, the one thing your generation has done is made martyrdom painless.’ ”

 … of having missed history’s bus …

“It’s guilt at not having participated. At not having done anything. I blew up neither physics labs in Ann Arbor nor Vietcong installations. I just vacillated in the middle. It’s still confusing to me. Only in the last few years have I tried to straighten it out in terms of my country. And now I know I should have gone, if only to bear witness.”

—
Esquire
, 1983

In August,
Esquire
published an article in which I made the apparently startling admission of having regrets about not having served in the Vietnam War. I say “apparently” because in ten years of journalism, I have never experienced the kind of reaction that one article elicited. It twanged some national chord. I was glad, having researched and written the piece in order to find out if anyone else felt this way. But I was genuinely surprised at the volume of the response. A brief consideration of that response might interest those who have thoughts on the matter, pro or con.

What I wrote was this: I was classified 4F, legitimately. At the time I was delighted and relieved. Now I tend to feel that, whatever the circumstances, I got off a little too clean. It was an ill-advised war, but it was a war. Some went and some didn’t.

I distinguished between “childish, mud- and blood-splattered romantic notions and dreams of glory,” and something else. I wondered if it wasn’t possible that by not going “we forfeited what might have been the ultimate opportunity, in increasingly self-obsessed times, of making the ultimate commitment to something greater than ourselves: the survival of comrades.”

None of this struck me as especially novel or insightful. I did not have to look under rocks or call up
Soldier of Fortune
magazine for sources. Among those I quoted were Philip Caputo, James Webb, Robert E. Lee and George Washington. James Fallows had broken the ground in
The Washington Monthly
eight years ago.

My piece was a kind of footnote, something I had been mulling over, and which had coalesced as I watched the dedication of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in November ’82. It was neither an endorsement of the Vietnam War nor an endorsement of war. It appeared before the Beirut bombings and the invasion of Grenada and the article in the Style section about the Airborne Rangers who got their jollies by “stomping to death” a homosexual.

I should have known something was wrong when the
Phil Donahue Show
called. (I declined.) Then the
Today
show called, followed by PBS, a number of radio stations. People writing books on the aftermath of Vietnam called.

Bob Greene wrote a syndicated column, slightly missing the point, which said he felt the same way, too, i.e., that those who didn’t go were cowards. I still cannot find where I said that, but never mind. Mike Royko, who doesn’t like Bob Greene, read Greene’s column and weighed in with a puzzlingly titled column,
DRAFT DODGERS BORINGLY BLUBBER THEIR GUILT
—puzzling because neither Greene nor I had in fact dodged the draft. Royko was royally peeved and ended his column with a suggestion: “Oh, shove it.”

Vermont Royster of
The Wall Street Journal
found it a reasonable thesis, and wrote a thoughtful piece placing it in historical perspective. Jules Feiffer did a very funny strip in which a “shallow $50,000 a year journalist” and a “glib $65,000 a year attorney” effetely fret at the tennis net over not going to Vietnam. “Of course, I wouldn’t want to get hurt,” says one in the last frame. “No,” concludes his partner, “I’d prefer to see others shot and learn from it.” My laughter over that last line has a nervous quality.

Then Richard Cohen of the
Post
wrote an ideologically guided epistle, describing my article as “something out of Kipling, or maybe Tennyson.” That is not such bad company, but it wasn’t meant as a compliment, for he viewed my article and the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Beirut as all of a piece. “Once again, we are in love with war,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous infatuation.” I felt a bit misunderstood at first, but calmed down on reflecting that Cohen reminds us conservative warmongers at least once a week that war is bad. I am sorry to disappoint him, but I agree with him.

All this, however, has not been half as interesting as the letters that four months later are still coming in. For the most part they are extraordinarily well-expressed, moving, provocative—and not necessarily sympathetic.

A twenty-seven-year-old counselor of Vietnam vets writes with the world-weary maturity of one who might have served in that war: “Don’t envy the soldier’s experience.… I admire them all for trying to hold up considering what they went through. But it is dangerous business to start looking even remotely fondly, for whatever reasons, at Vietnam. This is the first step towards forgetting all the many lessons we can learn from the war, and this is the first step towards getting ourselves in such a travesty again.”

A vet who returned in 1967 and who has had a hard time of it writes that he found in the article “a rare empathy, brimming with the recognition of sacrifice made by those like me, from those like you. This was all I ever really wanted. A recognition I never got from the junior personnel executives, the multitudes of them I have had appointments with. The ones who went straight from high school to the college campus to the business world, uninterrupted.”

Then two letters from the same person. The first is dated September 10 and explains that after years of malaise over having been in the Special Forces in the late ’60s but not having gone to Vietnam, he is volunteering, at age thirty-six, for the Airborne Rangers.

The second letter is dated November 15. It begins, “Whatever guilt I might have felt by my not participating in the Vietnam War has all been erased by recent adventures in Grenada.… Unfortunately, we lost three killed and six seriously wounded in three helicopter crashes on our last raid before pulling out.” It ends, “Please continue doing whatever you can to further the cause of Vietnam vets.”

I now understand that any rumination on any redemptive aspect of Vietnam, especially with American soldiers’ dying in another what-are-we-doing-here conflict, is bound to strike some as utter folly. If I glorified war, then I was the fool. It is such a delicate matter that praise for those who went should be prefixed and suffixed with ritual denunciations of war in general. I do not say that cynically; that is what the emotionalism of the public dialogue appears to require.

Among my article’s faults was that it wholly neglected the effect of the war on women. Some of the most compelling letters I am getting are from women. One writes to say she feels something like guilt over her inability to have a child. It has left her with a sense of unfulfilled womanhood. Another correspondent reports the very good news that Joe McDonald, late of Country Joe and the Fish, minstrels of the antiwar
movement, now holds benefit concerts for San Francisco-area Vietnam vets. What troubles her still is that she never asked her boyfriend about his war experiences. “You were correct,” she ends, “when you said that most people are comfortable with the course of action they took during the war years. I, however, am not one of them.”