"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War. Tom Burns

the South Vietnamese government and by ordering the covert bombing of Cambodia to destroy enemy supply routes and base camps, which set off nationwide student protests. During the Christmas season of 1972, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in the most intense campaign of its kind ever, again setting off protests all over the country. Nixon’s rhetoric of “peace with honor” could not conceal the continuing American goal of a non-Communist Vietnam, essential to his chief advisor Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik global strategy.50 It was, however, secret negotiations between Kissinger, who would become Nixon’s Secretary of State, and North Vietnam’s Le Duc, which began in 1970, that would eventually lead to the withdrawal of US troops in 1973.

With the implementation of Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which military responsibility was handed back to South Vietnam, defeat was virtually inevitable, and in fact came two years later, with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, followed by the reunification of the country by the North Vietnamese military and civilian authorities. By that time, the war had claimed over 57,000 American, and an estimated one to two million Vietnamese and other Indochinese, lives. The first article of the Paris Agreement, which formalized the withdrawal, stated: “The United States and all other countries respect the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam as recognized by the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam.”51 That is to say, nearly twenty years later and all the attendant deaths, suffering, and costs, the United States was back to square one.

Ultimately, American policy in Southeast Asia was based on a misunderstanding of historical, political, and military realities. Despite the fears of American leaders, the press, and the public, there had never been a global Communist expansion controlled by Moscow. As Hobsbawm has argued, “there is no real evidence that [the U.S.S.R.] planned to push forward the frontiers of communism by revolution until the mid 1970s,” that is, by the time that the Vietnam War had ended.52

The war had far-reaching political, as well as economic and social, consequences. It divided the Democratic Party—with two presidents from that party leading the nation into Vietnam—to such an extent that it never recovered its reputation since the 1930s as the progressive party of working people. The economic boom after World War II ended in 1963 with the global oil crisis, but also owing to the immense cost of the Vietnam War, which resulted in part in the downward spiral of working people’s incomes that continues until today. The social and historical significance of the war continued to be felt long afterward.53 The American public’s confidence in its government had been dealt a mortal blow, which gave an impulse to the “New Right” in subsequent years and the candidacies of men like Ronald Reagan, who actually campaigned for government office on anti-government platforms.

ii. The Soldiers

In contrast to historical works, the imaginative literature of the war has focused on its soldiers, most of whom were ignorant of, or indifferent to, the momentous events that have been described in the previous section. More than two million Americans eventually went to Vietnam, only a small part of whom actually saw combat. Robert D. Shulzinger claims that the combatants made up no more than 20% of the US forces at any time, with 80% comprising supply and support personnel, but most of the fiction and memoirs written by ex-soldiers are, not surprisingly, by combat veterans. The number of women estimated to have served in Vietnam constitutes a small minority, between 8,000 and 15,000.54 The fighting men had an average age of nineteen, as opposed to that of twenty-six for the combatants of World War II, and over 60% of all the men killed were between seventeen and twenty-one.55 These youths came primarily (80%) from poor or working-class neighborhoods, with a proportionally greater number coming from rural or small-town environments.56

In his important sociological study of these soldiers, Working-Class War (1993)—from which these statistics are quoted—Christian Appy has demonstrated that the class-division between those who would fight the war and those who would protest it was in fact ensured by government policy. The reserve manpower for wars was historically designed to be made up of men in the Army Reserves and the National Guard, but neither of these groups, which are made up of older men from more secure socio-economic environments, was called up for active service in Vietnam: out of a million reservists and national-guardsmen, only 37,000 were mobilized and only 15,000 sent to Vietnam. In fact, many men tried to enlist in the National Guard as a way of avoiding the draft and being sent to war, including the (later) Republican President, George W. Bush, who, with his father’s influence, was admitted into the Air National Guard in Texas. Restrictive admission policies to these units were a way of ensuring that the underprivileged strata of society would not be able to avoid being drafted. Besides, as Appy argues, going into the army after high-school, or even before graduating, was perceived by working-class youths as much an expected and unavoidable part of their lives as going to college was for those of their middle-class counterparts.57

The US government apparently wanted to maintain the war at a low social profile. Medical deferments, for example, were easier to obtain by the more socially and economically privileged classes, and college students were exempted from military service through a policy of draft-deferments for those who were able to maintain a certain grade-point average in their classes.58 As the war ground on and the need for manpower increased, these socially-selective policies were not relaxed; on the contrary, the government continued to resort to the underprivileged, its primary replacement depot. Secretary McNamara’s program known as “Project 100,000” was designed to call up an additional 300,000 men who had been previously rejected from the armed forces because of low test scores. Through this program, youths of the underclass (80% high-school dropouts, 40% African Americans), would be given the opportunity to acquire employable skills and, incidentally, go to war in the place of students and reservists. These men did go to war (half of all the men who had entered the program did so, more than a third directly into combat), and they were both court-martialed and killed at twice the usual rate without acquiring the promised skills.59

It is notable that the patriotic motives (stop Communism, promote freedom) cited as the nation’s justification for going to war were admitted by only 11% of the enlisted men who volunteered in 1964 (a percentage that dropped to 6.1% four years later, when the war was more unpopular). Appy lists a variety of other motivations, social and cultural, that were given by the men who joined the armed forces: a) escape (bad home, mean streets, the police); b) a strong need, however undefined, for self-affirmation; c) solidarity with high-school and working-class buddies; d) a job-prospect in a future perceived as generally hopeless; e) assimilation of the media culture (especially war movies); f) pressure from fathers, uncles, and other men who had fought in previous wars; and g) a traditional cultural assumption of war as a rite-of-passage to manhood.60 It can be readily perceived that these various motivations may be interlocking joint influences, for example, (a), (b) and (d), or (e), (f) and (g).

      Once these men, whatever their true motivations, were in the Armed Forces, they were taught, as part of the military’s indoctrination program, that they were helping an Asian nation to resist Communism, preserve democracy, and protect freedom. Their actual war experiences, however, contradicted those expressed aims at every turn. Communism turned out to have widespread popular support in both North and South Vietnam, even while the soldiers were told they were saving South Vietnam from Communist aggression. Accordingly, in the fiction of the war, the need to stop Communism tends to be invoked only by officers and “lifers,” as career