30th Anniversary Edition with Updated Author Notes
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
The Importance of Story
Individual and Cultural Effects of Skewing the Realities of
American Involvement in
Introduction
Allow me to read to you two short
passages from recent bestsellers which, I believe, reflect the most common,
current story, or image, or stereotype of American involvement in Southeast
Asia, and of American veterans.
The first is from Robert James Waller’s
1994-95 bestseller, Border Music. It tells the story of Texas Jack
Carmine, who “Took the last plane out of Saigon ...”
(Waller, 8) in 1975; and who “was a high-strung bow, drawn back, released,
pulled back again, day after day in a long life of drill rigs and fence
lines... and the recoil of .50 caliber machine guns that could sweep a Saigon
rooftop like a giant push broom.” (Waller, 143).
Jack’s above poetically described PTSD
is based on the following fictional scene of April 30, 1975:
Jack Carmine had pulled him into the
chopper. Turning and looking as the gunner opened up: gunner’s body shaking
with the recoil of the .50 caliber, ammo belt feeding into the .50 like the
fastest snake you’ve ever seen, blowing apart a woman and baby as the door came
off its hinges and people surged onto the roof. The .50 had suddenly stopped,
and the gunner named Carmine never fired another round all the way out to where
they landed on the Midway. (Waller, 233)
*Delivered in conference: The Viet Nam War, Texas Tech University
The second passage is from Pat
Conroy’s 1995 bestseller
Beach Music.
The protagonist is one Jack McCall of Charleston ,
South Carolina ; the time is 1985;
the scene, a meeting of McCall and several ‘friends’ from his high school class
of 1966. In the extract, ‘I’ is Jack McCall. The first speaker, the wife of a
character named Capers, is defending her husband to Jack.
“He went to Vietnam . You were a draft dodger.”
“That’s right, Miss South Carolina . Funny part is,
I can still kick his ass. If guys like me had gone to Vietnam , we
would’ve won the war...” (151)
Two pages
later Capers, Mike and Jack snap back and forth:
Capers continued, “What happened to us
in college wouldn’t have happened at any other time except for the Vietnam War.
But I was standing up for what I believed in. I thought my country was in
trouble.”
“The tears. They still come. Drivel
does that to me,” I said.
“Those were heavy times,” Mike said.
“Even you have to admit that, Jack. I dodged the draft then because I thought
it was the right thing to do and I didn’t want to get my ass shot off in a
country I couldn’t even spell.”
Capers added, “All of us made mistakes
during the Vietnam War.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t make one
fucking mistake during that entire war. I honored myself by being against that
silly-ass war.”
“The tides turning if favor of Viet
vets,”Capers said.
“Not with me. I’m tired of hearing Vietnam vets
whine. Has there ever been a group of vets in this country who were such
crybabies, who shouted ‘poor me’ so loud and so often? They seem to have
absolutely no respect for themselves.”
“A lot of us were spit on when we came
back to this country,” said Capers.
“Bullshit,” I said. “A lie. An urban
myth. I’ve heard it a thousand times and I don’t believe a word of it. And it
always happened in the airport.”
“That’s where it happened to me,” said
Capers.
“... You’re lying, Capers, and if it
happened you should have rammed the teeth down the asshole’s throat that did
it. That’s what I can’t believe. A million Vietnam vets get spit on and no one
loses a tooth. No wonder you lost the fucking war.”
In this paper, I would like to
establish a framework for the Importance of Story; then briefly examine how,
and in what forms, Viet Nam has entered the American consciousness; where that
story is skewed from verifiable reality; and why; and finally look at the
ramifications of the distortions, gaps and omissions in ambient cultural story.
I will touch on only a few elements of
this cultural self-narrative; on only a few images, and behavior patterns. I
will suggest a few changes to our popular memory which I believe are more in
line with verifiable reality; and will conclude by suggesting that unskewing
our ambient cultural story might be a step in impacting positively change to
American macro social behavior.
The
Framework
After my first novel, The 13th Valley, was published in
1982, I received approximately 3,000 letters, perhaps sixty percent from
American veterans. That letter-base, along with several hundred follow-up
interviews and a deep involvement with veterans and veteran’s issues, became
the source and the impetus for my third novel, Carry Me Home. While
writing Carry Me Home, I
developed a theory of cultural behavior to explain the complexities of
the phenomena I was examining: specifically, Post Traumatic Stress Disorders
afflicting American veterans of the war in Viet Nam . Like any good scientific theory I felt it needed to be
cohesive, simple, elegant, and capable of broad and accurate application. I did
not believe that current sociological theory was adequate. Perhaps it is only one
novelist’s perspective, but to me story is basic.
The story we tell ourselves
of ourselves, individually or culturally, creates our self-image. Behavior,
individually and culturally, is consistent with self-image. Story determines
behavior.
As story changes, self-image changes;
as self-image changes, behavior changes; as behavior changes, so too changes
the results of behavior. That is,
personal and cultural story have ramifications.
Because story has ramifications, it is
necessary to analyze and to understand the current story that we are telling
ourselves of ourselves. If one sees oneself as an academic, one behaves in
particular patterns. If one sees oneself as a writer, or a builder, as a
soldier, patriot or radical, one also behaves in particular patterns. One’s
behavior in the present is very different if he tells himself, “We Were Wrong.
Terribly Wrong.” (Newsweek, 17 Apr 95), than if he tells himself, it was a
“Noble Cause;” very different if one describes oneself as a victimized, crazy
Viet Nam Vet, or if one’s self-description is that of a proud conscientious
participant; and very different if one’s story
is of “being against that silly-ass war,” versus of “bearing any burden
in the defense of freedom.”
By the term Cultural Story, or more
fully, Ambient Cultural Story, I mean our current common knowledge,
or collective national myth, or conventional wisdom, popular
memory, and/or political folklore.
The story we tell ourselves of
ourselves, individually or culturally, creates our self-image. Self-image
consists of internalized, cumulative, and weighted images, which create belief
patterns, perceptual formats, understandings, and conceptualizations. At the
most fundamental level, self-image determines macro behavior.
Said another way, culture is built
upon self-image and beliefs, and self-image and beliefs are based upon ambient
story. Thus behavior is consistent with
self-image and with story. Behavior includes actions in the present as well as
plans and projections for the future.
Ambient cultural story is complex, fluid,
and subject to external pressures, yet it also tends to be homeostatic. By
ambient I mean general consensus, the bulk of the story, the feeling and
flavor we get from the news and from films, the data that becomes boilerplate
in news stories, or that is distilled into high school textbooks. I do not mean
that denials, variations and/or opposing stories are totally absent.
By fluid I mean that alteration
of ambient story is possible, and that such alteration changes self-image, and
thereby alters macro behavior. By homeostatic I mean that story tends
to revert to prior general consensus. For example, if one has repeatedly heard, and been convinced, that many American
soldiers in Viet Nam committed atrocities--were baby killers--then is told that
this actually was a tiny percentage, and that the incidents were always against
policy, one will tend to be reluctant to dismiss the bulk of the older ambient
story--particularly if it is still being reinforced by story generators.
By external pressures, I mean
that individually or culturally we are influenced by the stories others tell us
about ourselves. One might include here the written word, both fiction and
non-fiction--but in America today the greatest external pressure on story comes
from television--a medium from which more than half of all Americans derive one
hundred percent of their news, a story generator, or information gatekeeper,
which the average American watches for more than six hours each day.
Behavior is consistent with
self-image. That is a basic tenet. There
are individual deviations and group
self-image is necessarily more complex than individual self-image; still
self-image controls attitudes and actions.
. When
we, as a nation, believed in Manifest Destiny, our policies and actions
reflected that belief. When we viewed ourselves as an altruistic nation
willing to go anywhere, to bear any
burden in the defense of freedom, our
actions and foreign policy tended to be in accord with those principles,
with that idealism. In Carry Me Home, one character addressing a mock
trial in 1984 expressed an altered cultural story:
Now we exist in a time in America where
we believe in looking out for number one, in the me generation, in getting our
piece of the pie no matter whom we screw-over or abandon. Once duty was
considered a virtue. Now it is equated with depravity. The ancient Greeks used
to say, Ethos anthropou daimon. A person’s story is his fate. And a
nation’s myth, the story it tells itself of itself, is a nation’s fate. (628)
What happens to a culture if the
people come to believe they are as
morally bankrupt as their social commentators tell then they are? Or if the
people come to view themselves as prone to violence and greed, racism and
bigotry? Is the thresholds for reacting in manners consistent with those
images lower than if the view is of a
people as accountable and disciplined citizens?
Macro behavior is consistent with
self-image and self-image always meshes with ambient story unless acted upon by
a significant, outer force. Yet the theory of cultural macro behavior cannot be
used to determine specific behaviors of individuals. It is, instead, analogous
to quantum physics. One cannot predict the behavior of a particular individual
from cultural myth any more than one can predict the path of a specific
electron--but overall trends can be predicted, and accurately. And they can be
directed by controlling ambient story.
Randolph Hearst’s role in the
Spanish-American War is an example of story-control altering macro
behavior. Another example might be drawn
from the billions of dollars spent yearly
on advertisements--a form of story telling or image-making. Indeed, today, this
is a primary form of cultural image manipulation.
Another example may be inferred from
recently expressed fears that America ’s
image makers and information disseminators are becoming too monopolistic. Will
Disney/ABC or Westinghouse/CBS control cultural story making via narrow, story info-tainment?
Pol Pot’s Year Zero policy is an
extreme example of an attempt to wipe out existing cultural story and supplant
it with an alien ideology in order to alter macro behavior.
Story
is not always complete--there are omissions and gaps, both expedient and
purposeful. Story is not always accurate--there are extrapolations,
embellishments and fabrications. Story is not static--it is always growing,
dying, being revised and reinvented. What is consistent is that story forms
self-image, and behavior is consistent with self-image.
There are many ways to describe people. For individuals we
might include age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, political tendencies,
religious affiliations, region, race, height, color of eyes, size of nose,
amount of facial hair. These tags represent characteristics. Ethnicity has
characteristics; so too, nationality, religion, and political affiliation. For
the individual we might call story-based cumulative characteristics,
personality. For a group, we might use the term, culture.
Some elements of personality or of
culture are shaped by specific, defining moments. For example, I recall
one cold winter evening when I was fifteen years old, and I had just left swim
team practice at the Orrcutt Boy’s Club on Bridgeport’s eastside. I was alone,
I don’t remember why. I think I missed my ride. That night, perhaps 500 or 600
feet from where I stood, in a circle of light in at the far side of Washington Park , I witnessed a group of boys, I
think they were younger than I was, stoning (or apple-ing) an old woman. There
were perhaps fifteen boys. The woman could not defend herself other than
shuffling on, trying to protect her head with an upraised arm. I don’t believe
the boy’s physically damaged her. She and they disappeared. Still, at that
time, I did nothing, fearful that I might get myself badly beaten; frozen into
inaction, into non-involvement. I have thought about that incident many
times. For me, that night was a defining
moment; and to me, South
Viet Nam was much like that old woman.
Principles
of Application
Long term, or cultural, ramifications
of public programs, policies or laws, or of media projections, often differ from
the intent of those programs, policies, laws or projections--because individual
and cultural self-images induced are more determinant to long term, macro
behaviors, than are the direct effects of the policies or projections.
For example: If one is working with
youths, one must be very cautious in the manner programs are established to
prevent unwanted behaviors-- drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, suicide--LEAST the
program have the opposite long term effect and actually increase the unwanted
behavior by creating elements of self-image that would not otherwise be
present. Two very different example might be drawn from the creation of poverty
pockets while attempting to provide affordable housing; or the creation of
‘loser-status’ among Viet Nam veterans while attempting to treat PTSD.
Some elements of the very complex
self-image of America in Southeast Asia smack one in the face; other fragments
follow like a shadow on a cloudy day. Viet Nam is always with us, always working
on our collective consciousness, blatantly or near subliminally.
Let us look at a few elements of
ambient cultural story regarding America ’s
involvement in Southeast Asia . American troops
committed atrocities in Viet
Nam . This is verifiable and cross-verifiable.
This is part of our story--as a matter of fact, it is a very major part of our
ambient cultural story, a part of the immorality of the American effort. Some
see every American veteran as Jack Carmine.
At the village of My Lai ,
Americans murdered 109, or 346, or 500 unarmed civilians. Between 1963 and
1977, the three television networks in the United
States broadcast 9447 stories regarding Viet Nam , Laos ,
and Cambodia
on the evening news. (Network Evening News)
Of those stories, fully five percent dealt with the atrocity at My Lai . Considering the point of exposure, the percentage
of coverage rises to better than ten--approximately five hundred news stories
relating to that one event. The ambient story of atrocities in Southeast Asia
essentially is the story of My Lai .
I do not want to downplay that
incident. It was horrid and the perpetrators were not properly punished.
However, the reality of verifiable atrocities, which forms a gap in our ambient
cultural story, is much larger than My Lai ;
and much less ethnocentric. It begins in
the mid-1940s when colonial regimes around the world were collapsing and France was
attempting to slow the disintegration of its empire. At that time there were
perhaps twenty Viet Namese nationalist groups, of which the Communists were but
one. All were anti-colonial. Over a period of eight years,
Ho Chi Minh and his followers usurped power from all by cajole, coercion, and
assassination. Writing of the political fallout of an attack lead by Vo Nguyen
Giap against “two tiny French posts” on Christmas Eve 1944, Stanley Karnow, in
a 1990 interview of General Giap, writes;
The
victory swelled Ho’s ranks. [Later,] in September 1945, following Japan ’s surrender, [Ho] declared the
independence of Vietnam .
Named commander of the Vietminh armed forces, Giap assumed the rank of general.
Ho also appointed him Minister of Interior, a position Giap reportedly used to
liquidate a number of non-communist nationalist parties--and, some sources
allege, even his Communist rivals.” (Karnow, NYT, 58)
This is not part of our ambient
cultural story, yet without this element, one cannot understand American
actions of this period; nor of the period just prior to the commitment of the
first America
advisory teams.
In the North, in the years after the
Geneva Accords of 1954, no non-communist group, no matter how much love its
members expressed for their homeland, was allowed to form or grow. Deaths from
Communist-lead ‘reforms’ between December 1953 and July 1956, have been placed
variously at from 5,000 to one million.
Let us look, for a moment, at these variations.
According to Edwin E. Moise, who has
attempted to justify Communist behavior of this time, “...’leftist’ excesses
were most widespread during waves four and five,” which effected approximately
9,000,000 people in North Viet Nam, or sixty five percent of the population.
Moise continues, “Most accounts published in the West have described the land
reform as a bloodbath...” The estimated range is from Richard Nixon’s 500,000 executed
plus 500,000 deaths in slave labor camps, to Bernard Fall’s 50,000 executed. D.
Gareth Porter, however claimed the “documentary evidence for the bloodbath
theory seems to have been a fabrication.” According to Moise:
It was considered a great accomplishment
to expose as a reactionary, or as a landlord, someone who had not previously
been known to be one. The result was that many people were denounced for things
they had never done, and probably over 30,000 peasant households were wrongly
classified... Anyone who tried to defend the victims was likely to be denounced
in turn as being ‘connected with landlords.’ (Moise, 83)
Porter, in his own writings, claims
the exaggerations were a “...stereotype which belittled the intelligence, the
patriotism and the humanity of the Vietnamese Communists movement...” (Porter,
12) He further notes:
...although
the land reform program was marred by administrative failures, its aims were to
liberate the poor peasant from the threat of famine... Hitherto powerless elements
were encouraged for the first time to assert themselves, and although the
short-term consequences were widespread abuse and conflict... the experience of
other nations suggest... a positive development over the long run. (Porter, 11)
Paul Harris of the Royal Military
Academy at Sandhurst
sees land reform from a different angle.
...the
(Communist) Party itself did not think land redistribution a good policy in the
long run. Agriculture would ultimately be the more inefficient if holdings were
sub-divided; and ideologically the encouragement of peasant individualism would
be more likely to produce a society akin to the French Third
Republic ... In the long
run the party wanted to industrialise, the proletariat not the peasantry were
to be the vanguard of Vietnam’s advance, and carrying the country forward in
this way would involve state control on collectivisation of agriculture.
Nevertheless the Party’s leaders were realists and were prepared in the short
term to give the peasants some of what they wanted in order to ensure their
support. (Harris, 5)
Despite this duplicity, Moise’s
analysis concludes, “...the total number of people executed during the land
reform was probably in the vicinity of 5,000... the slaughter of tens of
thousands or innocent victims, often described in anti-Communist propaganda,
never took place.” (Moise, 78)
Of course, one might
suggest that Moise erred by basing much of his work on the Communist Party
newspaper, Nhan-Dan; and by ignoring the five issues--September to November
1956-- of North Viet Nam’s only independent newspaper--before it was
suppressed--Nhan-Van. In addition to information on land reform, criticisms in
Nhan-Van were:
“directed,
not against wretched living conditions, but against the complete absence of
freedom, the lack of civic rights, of a Constitution, and of any code of laws,
and against the high-handed and dictatorial behaviour of senior officials.
Sy-Ngoc writes (Nhan-Van, 15 October 1956): ‘If somebody tells me to keep my
mouth shut in case the Americans and Diem should make capital out of what I
say, I reply: “Diem has a very good case when he refuses to hold joint
consultations with us on the ground that there is no freedom in North
Vietnam.”’ (Grindrod, 253)
The obscuration caused by the debate on the number of
deaths during the ‘53 to ‘56 land reform campaign in North Viet Nam has essentially
eliminated this causation as an element of our involvement from our ambient
cultural story. However, if one accepts even the lowest and most apologetic
estimate, by population percentage it would be the equivalent today of having
an education reform policy in the United States which executed the top 100,000
American professors and teachers. Some of you may sympathize with that, but it
would be ludicrous to deny it was a bloodbath. And it is ludicrous that it is
not part of our story. If this is not known, can American reaction to proposed elections of 1956, or anything that
followed thereafter, be rationally assessed?
These atrocities are also relevant to the discussion of
whether Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist or a Communist. The problem is the
discussion is misguided. With certainty one can say Ho was a nationalist--just
as were Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot and others of their ilk. The
discussion should not center on nationalism, but focus on legitimacy and the
atrocities listed above must cause one to question that legitimacy.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of this one element.
Atrocities continued. In the 1959, Hanoi ’s
politburo received a series of
reports
indicating that even though the North had been directing a phase one guerrilla
insurgency in the South for two years, the South was socially and economically
out-pacing the North. “By Tet of 1959,” William Colby writes in his book, Lost
Victory, “it was plain that a nationalist and non-Communist Vietnam was
firmly established. It was also becoming apparent that its future was, if
anything, more promising than the gray and regimented society in the North.”
(Colby, 52)
It was in response to these reports
that the Communists decided, in May of 1959--to establish Trail 559 [later to
be expanded and become known as
the Ho Chi
Minh Trail], and to launch an expanded insurgency, the Second Indochina War. By
1961 northern Communist were
assassinating one hundred southern hamlet, village, and/or district officials
each month. By 1962 that figure had
grown to one thousand per month. If this is not part of our ambient
cultural story, can one make sense of Eisenhower’s or Kennedy’s troop
responses?
Still atrocities did not stop, did not
slow down. It does seem that the killing of 3,000 to 6,000 civilians, many
picked by name, at Hue in 1968, during the Communist occupation of that city,
is, despite total denial by D. Gareth Porter, indeed at least tangentially a
part of our common knowledge; but what of the city of Baray in Cambodia,
reduced to rubble by NVA artillery in 1971 killing perhaps 20,000 civilians; or
the shelling of Song Be City; or the slaughter of thousands of civilians in
stalled columns fleeing the Central Highlands; or the execution of 70,000 South
Viet Namese in the first ninety days after the fall of Saigon (Sagan); or the
ethnic cleansing and genocide aimed at the indigenous peoples of the mountains
in Cambodia, Laos and Viet Nam? Not part of our ambient cultural story! But
then, most of these elements received not one minute of American network news
air time. Nor, and feel I must say, ‘of course,’ did the violent
anti-government rioting in Hue, in December 1995--in which some 40,000 people
took to the streets, set cars ablaze, and demanded the removal of Communist
restrictions on the Buddhist church.
Gary Sherrick, a character in Carry
Me Home, said it this way:
There is a politically correct way to
think about the Viet Nam War. There is an academically acceptable perspective
from which to write about the war. There is a socially agreeable position; and
there are media-tolerable project-ibles. These manners, perspectives, positions
and projections have fluctuated over the years but have swayed only slightly
since 1968 when London Johnson declined to run for a second full term, and when
Walter Cronkite converted and established an acceptable antiwar posture for
nonradicals. That these ossified perspectives are narrow seems to have bothered
few politicians, academics, John and Jane Does, reporters, editors or film
makers. And after nearly a decade and a half most everyone is in agreement--and
most everyone, because of the exact narrowness of the perspective, is half
wrong. (Del Vecchio, 619)
In 1983 media mogul Ted Turner charged
that ABC, CBS and NBC “have
taken the
yellow-journalistic route...” He further has stated:
The
networks are poisoning our nation... poisoning the whole world against us...
The three networks are failures. We’re approaching the 21st century with the
most powerful communications force the world has ever seen. And it’s being
totally misused by three organizations that couldn’t care less about what
happens to the nation. (Turner)
And to what effect? Somehow, amid their barbarity, amid their
lengthy purges, the Communist, by controlling story in the name of “the broad
masses of the oppressed and exploited throughout the world” (Mao, 135), were
able to claim moral superiority; were able to label American soldiers as
immoral; were able to alter macro behavior so that returning American fighting
men were treated as if they’d started the war; as if, in Charlie Sheen’s words
in the final scene of the film, ‘Platoon’, we had gone half way around the
world to fight the enemy, only to find “the enemy was us!”
Robert Caldwell, and editorialist from
San Diego ,
quoted in Phan Kim Vinh’s 1982 book, Vietnam After 1975: Bamboo Gulags and
Subtle Genocide, beseeched the media in these terms:
Because
confession is good for the soul, an influential portion of the press corps this
country sent to Vietnam
would do well to ponder its contributions to the tragic sequence of events that
delivered millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians to a tragic fate. (Vinh,
4)
William Shawcross, author of Sideshow:
Nixon, Kissinger and the Destruction of Cambodia , did recently
reexamine his role when he stated in the London Times:
Those of
us who opposed the American War (sic) in Indochina should be extremely humble
in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia ...
Looking back on my own coverage, I think I concentrated too easily on the
corruption and incompetence of the South Viet Namese and their American allies,
and was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi
regime... (The SITREP, 20)
Perhaps there were humanitarian
reasons for America
to intervene on the side of the South. What would American be like today if our
ambient cultural story were one of the immorality and inhumanity of
non-involvement, of not opposing and therefore allowing the slaughter
and enslavement of Viet Namese, Khmer, Lao, Cham and Mountain peoples by Hanoi ’s Communist regime.
What if Hanoi ’s
immorality was not excused because of the absurdity and incompetence of Robert
McNamara; or the criminality of William Calley? How would that belief and
perspective have changed the reception accorded returning veterans? What would
our most popular writers write--talents like Conroy and Waller--if they were
reflecting this ambient cultural story versus the cliches they’ve encompassed
in their most recent works? How would an ambient perception that American
soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen had engaged in a humanist cause have
changed the story of PTSD? Or changed anti-veteran bigotry? What would be the
effect on the presidential election of 1996?
Might we come to think that abuses of
power in the pursuit of freedom are not justifications for the abandonment of
that pursuit?
Futility
But, of course, there were other
problems. America
didn’t fight the war properly. Hamburger
Hill has become an anchor for that element of our cultural story. Young men thrown against a worthless hill on
the outskirts of nowhere, thrown repeatedly into the meat grinder of NVA
machine guns and artillery, only to finally defeat the enemy, to finally drive
him from Dong Ap Bai, and then, THEN, to abandon the hill and let the NVA have
it again! With tactics as idiotic
as those, the ambient story stresses, no wonder we got our butts kicked; no
wonder the war was unwinnable. As Karnow writes, “...the human cost of the
futile engagement further roused criticism of the war at home.” (Karnow, 600)
But... there is an unrecognized side
to that story, too. Hamburger Hill was part of the western ridge of the A Shau
Valley. Without the A Shau, the North Viet Namese Army was not mobile enough to
outflank southern forces. Mobility,
surprise, flanking movements, won, what in reality, had become a conventional
war. The idea that after mid-1965 Viet Nam was primarily a guerrilla war should be thoroughly
scrutinized--whether or not it is part of our ambient cultural story.
When the A Shau was abandoned for good
in 1973, after all Americans had withdrawn from Viet Nam , the NVA established a
‘super highway’ down through its center. To supply the 18,000 military trucks,
tanks, and artillery pieces the communist army was using, the NVA constructed a
four-inch oil, and a twelve-inch gasoline pipeline from north of the DMZ, down
through the A Shau, into the Central Highlands, to the vicinity of Loc Ninh.
This new logistic ability gave some 400,000 Northern troops in late 1974 and
early 1975 the mobility to mass forces against comparatively sparsely defended
points. (Betson; Dougan, 11-13) The
American operation at Hamburger Hill, and so many like it in the 1960s and
‘70s, indeed kept the NVA at bay. The feeling or image has been that the war
did not make any sense, “that silly-ass war,” as Conroy expressed it. This is
pervasive in film and fiction, “Don’t mean nothin,” --almost a mantra--is
accurate only if one has no knowledge of the activities of the Communist side.
Ignorance exacerbates PTSD. (Hendon/Haas) That includes ignorance on the part of
counselors and therapists. (Young)
AFRVN
Still, there is the portrait of an
American effort characterized by incompetents. And of the war being unwinnable.
We were wrong, we have been told, terrible wrong, for ever having thought we
could positively impact the situation. One might politically agree with that
ambient attitude, particularly the criticisms aimed at LBJ and his defense
secretary. But what is missing from our cultural knowledge is the competence,
efficiency, gallantry, and altruism of American AND South Viet Namese fighting
forces.
Perhaps you are scratching your head,
wondering if I’m really talking about the ARVN. Yes, I am. The process of Viet
Namization gradually worked. Stanley Karnow, though he thrashed the South Viet
Namese for 650 pages, admitted in a short clip deep in his book, that by 1972
North Viet Namese rifle companies were no match for South Viet Nam ’s military forces.
(Karnow,658-9) This was not only true of the crack 1st ARVN Division, or the
Hac Bao, or the ARVN Rangers. He was talking about Regional and Popular Forces.
The facts here are verifiable. There are thousands of documents like DIA
Intelligence Report No. 6 029 0800 70, of 3 August 1970. in which a Viet Cong
sapper of ten years defected and stated that he believed, “Communism was not
winning,” because “the ARVN was growing too strong;” that each year “over 10
men deserted from his Sapper Subsection...;” and that “the morale of his unit
was low because the men were tired of fighting, afraid of death, and felt they
were losing the war...” The problem is,
few in America , other
than ex-members of the Armed Forces of
the Republic of Viet Nam and some of their counterparts,
seem to know, or care.
Tenacity
and True Nationalists
Instead, if Americans read, hear, or
know anything about the ARVN, it is usually about their desertion rates, the
figures of which are often used to show that the South Viet Namese did not
support their own country. Generally omitted from our story is that most
desertions from the ARVN were by men who left national units which operated at
long distances from their homes, to join Regional or Popular forces within
their home districts; and that in 1972 alone, 40,000 North Viet Namese
soldiers deserted to the South. As North Viet Namese General Tran Van Tra wrote
in a 1982 account of the period following the North’s 1972 Nguyen Hue
offensive, and the AFRVN’s counter offensive:
Our troops
were exhausted and their units in disarray... We had not been able to make up
our loses... and coping with the enemy was very difficult.
Certainly not part of our ambient
cultural story. Nor is the fact that North Viet Namese General Vo Nguyen Giap,
victor of Dien Bien Phu and architect of the
North’s strategy in the South, was relieved of command in 1972--for incompetence!
(Betson)
How many times has it been repeated
that the soldiers of the South would not or did not fight for their country.
General Alfred Gray, in Al Santoli’s Leading The Way, reminds us of the
lasting ARVN commitment:
The last
day, as the country was collapsing, I listened to the military radio and could
still hear the South Viet Namese marines fighting up near Da Nang . The North Viet Namese had overrun Da Nang weeks
before... The marines went into the
hills and were fighting back. Forty three of their company commanders died
while fighting in the hills.
One might compare this with Stanley
Karnow’s much more widely distributed words: “...forty thousand (NVA) troops
had overrun Xuan-loc... The battle raged for two weeks--the ONLY [my
emphasis] engagement during the government’s last phase in which its forces
fought well.” (Karnow, 68-)
Paul Harris, a British critic of
American tactics, treats the unwinnable war theory with contempt. “History,” he
writes, “is not pre-programmed to fulfill the ambitions of Marxist politicians;
and the inevitable is what the fool hasn’t the wit to avoid.” (20)
An Allied
Loss
Let me jump to Viet Nam being the only war America ever
lost. It now seems to be partially recognized that America was not defeated on the
battlefield. As Harry Summers wrote in an editorial in the June 1995 issue of Vietnam
magazine:
Nothing
even remotely similar happened to the U.S.
military in Vietnam .
Beginning in 1969 the U.S.
military withdrew from Vietnam
in good military order, with the last U.S.
ground combat unit departing in August 1972, almost three years before South Vietnam
fell to the Communists. And the military withdrew not because of enemy pressure
on the battlefield, but because of domestic political pressure back home.
Rooftop
pictures not withstanding (the famous photo is not, as is oft said, the U.S.
Embassy roof), the US
military was not driven from Viet Nam . America , via
congressional actions and responding to a skewed story, decided to no longer fight the war, and to no
longer support the South. The American budget for ‘73-’74, adjusted for
inflation, was four percent of the American peak budget of 1969. The budget for
‘74-’75 was one percent of the ‘69 figure.
The ‘74 budget for North Viet Nam ,
as supplied by the Soviet Union and other
Communist Bloc nations, has been estimated at 400 percent of it’s previous high
of 1971. [Perhaps this does not comprise a sellout, but it certainly
represents an uncontested repossession!] The battle was lost.
Saigon, Vientiane , Phnom Penh fell. Conventional wisdom here is
verifiable. But the reasons seem to be lost to our ambient cultural story.
$$$$$$
There are many reasons why our ambient
cultural story remains askew: vested personal, political, or academic interests
are but a few. One of the more subtle is the economic interests that big
business and finance has in maintaining the story as currently distorted.
Below, self-described ‘radical’ social economist, Robert Pollin explained in
conference our economic ambient cultural story and its staying power in these
terms:
...a
fundamental idea about U.S.
economic policy making... emerged from the Vietnam experience... large-scale government spending associated
with the war engendered an uncontrollable and debilitating inflation. As such,
the Vietnam
experience contributed significantly to the demise of a view... that
enlightened capitalist governments could and would achieve sustained full
employment and widespread prosperity... (Baker, et. al., 1)
This, according to
Pollin, has lead to economic interventionist policies purportedly concerned
with “preventing another Vietnam-like build-up of inflationary momentum...”
Pollin continues:
...the economic legacy of Vietnam has been molded into a
cautionary tale of the failures of large-scale (economic) interventionist
policy and the overriding dangers of inflation. (Baker, 1)
Yet Pollin sees a
co-variant reality of the economic element of our ambient cultural story as
follows:
...to
focus on inflation alone ignores the other side of the same experience: that
the Vietnam war spending also contributed to an enormous advance in social and
economic progress in the 1960s...
Vietnam war spending created a near full-employment labor market. Full
employment then brought in its train, higher wages, better working conditions,
and less (my emphasis) discrimination against women, African Americans
and other minorities... Baker, 1-2)
The unemployment rate for African
Americans and other minorities also reached a post World War II low of 7.2
percent during 1965-69... The dramatic decline (from 10.8%) in black
unemployment was widely recognized as the single most effective means for
bringing opportunity and a modicum of social justice to African Americans;
this, despite the much greater amount of publicity being given to “War on
Poverty” programs and civil rights legislation. (Baker, 16)
“Why,” Pollin asks, “has this positive economic legacy of the
Vietnam war been neglected?” His
answer is that although the war economy was good for domestic social gain, it
was not good for ‘big business and finance,’ which suffered losses due to
higher wages, and because loans were being repaid with inflated dollars. As
Pollin has written: “...those who perceived themselves as faring badly from the
war... want to present the economic legacy of Vietnam in strictly negative
terms...” (Baker, 3) Said another way, big business and big finance has a
vested interest in maintaining many of the myths of American involvement in Southeast Asia .
A Longer
View
I would like to suggest a longer, and
broader historical view of American involvement in Southeast
Asia . Viet Nam was a
hot battle of the Cold War. Today, one might realize that the results of that
battle, a Communist victory, are less significant than the results of the war.
To state that the results of the Cold War--without that long, hot battle--would
be identical to what transpired, is speculation. I’m not sure if that
discussion has entered our national consciousness, even if it is generally
perceived that the West won the Cold War.
Other
Elements of The Story
There is more, so much more. The war
“ended” in 1975 yet in the following decade an estimated 2.2 million Southeast
Asians were killed by
“non-warfare”.
The story of interracial violence
within the American military has repeatedly been portrayed in popular media
projections, yet the ambient story we hold is distorted both in number and in
emphasis. During the very worst year of inter-American violence, the total
number of Serious Incident Reports (SRI) with racist causation was
approximately two hundred, for a force, including rotations, that numbered some
700,000. (Brooks) And what was very seldom reported was the millions of close
interracial friendships--that is racial harmony within an American military, which had never before
been so totally integrated. One might speculate that the skewing of story is to
the detriment of race relations in America today; that were our
ambient cultural story one of racial harmony, and our self-image one of people
getting along without regard to skin tone, that our macro behavior would follow
story and image.
I find myself concerned today not only
about how story, myth, or popular memory effect veterans of the Second
Indochina War, but also how that story is effecting our children. The
principles of harmony and tolerance are taught and fostered in our schools--yet
our schools continue to emphasize the
worst, and disregard the best, with respect to Americans in Southeast Asia . This is self-defeating.
Stated
simply, negatively skewed, inaccurate perceptions, like emotional
depression, make one vulnerable. Herbert Hendon and Ann Pollinger Haas, in
their work, Wounds of War, explain how positive cultural image both
insulates veterans from symptoms of PTSD, and, more importantly, prepares or
predisposes soldiers before combat for proper action during battle which
essentially creates a situation in which PTSD is less likely to develop.
It is important to keep in mind that
our cultural story, our mythos, includes not only the misjudgements, errors,
crimes, atrocities and scandals of our past, but also the great accomplishments,
the altruistic struggles, the valor and sacrifice earned and waged with
tremendous effort, that has brought betterment of the human condition to
millions. If only the negatives of our story are reinforced, and the positives
are denied or dismissed, then our culture will have no positive role models,
and our behavior will reflect our negative self-image.
To summarize, this novelist’s
perspective argues that ambient cultural story--the story we tell ourselves of
ourselves--creates cultural self-image; and that cultural self-image determines
macro behavior in the present, and plans and strategies for the future; that
our cultural story regarding America and Southeast Asia is replete with
distorted images and skewed themata--mainly by huge omissions, by active
policies of extreme ethnocentric emphasis, and by ideological and economic
bias.
Finally, a more accurate cultural
story might have insulated veterans, as individuals, from the ravages of PTSD;
and this nation, as a culture, against the evolution of unnecessary domestic
polarization and violence, and absurd foreign policies.
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