It was the spring of 1980. I was a high school junior in American history. After spending six weeks on World War I, another six weeks on World War II, a week on the Korean War, finally we were going to learn about the Vietnam War. I could not wait. The whole hippie ’60s era of which I had little recollection fascinated me. The teacher began to talk about the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam while our youthful eyes wandered around the room to study black-and-white pictures of the times of which he spoke: American combat soldiers on patrol in the jungle; that famous scene of a teen-age girl wailing over the dead body of an anti-war protester; impoverished Vietnamese villagers; war protesters placing flowers in the rifles of riot police. What a mass of confusion. Complex. Intense. Crazy.
As I recall, the history lesson on Vietnam was rather abbreviated. Odd, considering this war was much longer than the world wars and certainly more controversial. It had just ended five years ago. I wanted to know all about the war protesters, the draft, the bumper sticker “Pray for our POWs and MIAs”—so much to learn from just awhile ago. To the history teacher, it must have seemed like another lifetime, so much had changed. Yet the ’60s was the era I wished I had been a part of (at 17 already summarizing the rest of the ’70s as boring musically and socially). Bob Dylan had said of the national calm during the remainder of the ’70s “wounds were healing.” But a recent piece of American history would remain missing from my schooling. Why?
During the ’60s and early ’70s, the war may have always been on TV, but it never captured my childhood attention. As I grew into a teen, rediscovering The Beatles and watching retrospectives on the tumultuous ’60s especially the millions of young Americans who marched in protests which often turned violent for some reason, I found out the secret about Vietnam: It was our national disgrace, our collective painful humiliation, a wound still bleeding from the heart of America. Perhaps Vietnam was like our country’s heart attack, and afterwards we were forced to live more cautiously and carefully.
The ones with firsthand knowledge of the war were mute, too. I doubt one Vietnam vet would have spoken to our American history class when I was in high school. Many men who served in Vietnam were so proud when returning home from the war, wearing their dress blues or greens, only to be verbally assaulted by thousands of angry protesters, their own generation. “They sh— on us,” one vet told me when I was a reporter in the 1990s. “What?!” I asked in disbelief. “They threw bags of sh— on us when we arrived in San Francisco,” he said.
Sounds of silence
A couple of older cousins fought in Vietnam and returned somehow changed. Quiet at large happy family Christmas gatherings. Somber. Aloof. Aged. One of my kin was shot up so badly, he had to be put back together with metal rods. I felt so sorry for him and all the guys who had to go fight in Vietnam. Their youth was taken away.
So timely was “The Vietnam War,” the lengthy PBS documentary. A lot of questions were answered, mostly by the men who fought the war, on both sides. The war was not so complicated. It was simply that old adage: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In the beginning, Americans were honorably compelled to fight communism at all cost. A few years later, however, the war became a one-way ticket for the working class and minorities while other young men with names like Bush, Cheney, Quail and Clinton never had to go to Vietnam. It was the days of the draft. At home many Americans were earning a living off of the war machine. The soldiers, guys on average 19 years old, were not equipped to overwhelm the enemy; their M16 assault rifles were no match for the enemy’s AK-47s. That fact alone led to countless deaths, injuries and permanent disabilities.
Then there’s the Vietnam vet who was deaf in one ear, married with a baby, in college and still drafted as a combat soldier. He showed me an album of Vietnam snapshots, images that jolt the memory: one moment carefree, the other disconcerting. He was a slender young man in black-framed glasses, rifle at the ready, walking a jungle trail, smiling at the camera like a small-town Texan. Then he picked out one for me to see: a row of eight military boots, each containing a rifle. “What’s this about?” I asked. He took some time before responding, waiting to collect his thoughts or let emotion pass. That’s how his platoon honored those killed the night before in an ambush. It was a battlefield funeral of sorts.
The dead of night
Not to be too hard on my old high school American history teacher, he did tell us THE lesson of the Vietnam War: America cannot be the savior of the world. The cynicism struck me cold. It had been just a few years ago in elementary school when we were told our country was the greatest because we cared about other nations. That’s why we were involved in world affairs, from fighting communism to helping the Third World through the Peace Corps: It’s the American way.
The lessons of Vietnam are sordid and sundry: Americans aren’t right all the time and weren’t right about communism; invaders cannot win the hearts of the invaded or know the terrain like natives; and all the money in the world cannot force cultural change. Almost upon arrival, American soldiers were told to go back home by the Vietnamese themselves, the very people we were there to save from communism. That’s what the vets said in the documentary.
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It was the fall of 2001. I was covering a Support the Troops rally shortly after 9/11. People were cheering a parade of American troops marching off to Afghanistan. One of the supporters was a Vietnam vet. I had mentioned the high school American history lesson about that war. “It seems here we are, trying to save the world again,” trying to engage conversation, get another point of view, play devil’s advocate. He offered no response, just looked at me with the knowing eyes of experience and explained a very small percent of the military actually go into combat. He felt the U.S. was doing the right thing sending troops to Afghanistan. This time America had been attacked, so it was totally different from Vietnam. Truth be told, even since Vietnam, the U.S. had continually engaged in military battles from Central America to the Middle East—as if we never learned THE lesson anyway.
But there is another lesson from the Vietnam War for Americans, given all that had happened here and abroad, its status as a police action and undeclared war, the human loss, financial cost, and disillusionment. People around this big old world are mostly tribal, and Americans are not. That’s a colossal difference especially when it comes to war. Maybe the Vietnam lesson is we can’t save the world from itself. Maybe America should let it be, the concluding song of the Vietnam War documentary. For those touched by that war and its everlasting memory, the better choice is Blackbird.