Viet Nam Comes Home

By LANCE MORROW

Two winning films signal the struggle to learn from a lost war

Englishmen who fought at Ypres and the Somme carried the Oxford Book of English Verse in their haversacks; such literary brigades in the trenches would find their minds chiming with a line of Keats, or William Dunbar's Timor Mortis Conturbat Me. The Americans in Viet Nam usually packed more kinetic cultural effects. Images given them over the years by movies and television would sometimes unreel in their brains as they moved toward a tree line or a Vietnamese village, and in bizarre synaptic flips between reality and pictures, they would see themselves for an instant as, say, Audie Murphy winning his Congressional Medal of Honor in To Hell and Back. One writer called these dislocating fan tasies "life-as-movie, war-as-war-movie, war-as-life." The men could ridicule "John Wayneing," but the effect was metaphysically spooky. And, of course, it could get you killed.

Much of the American grief in Viet Nam was played out in the national imagination by way of movies and television. If the grunts on search-and-destroy in the Central Highlands sometimes kept themselves going with a jolt of John Wayne from The Sands of two Jima, the people at home took their war each night live in their living rooms, mainlined by television directly into the bloodstream. Viet Nam was so intimately recorded that it became almost unendurably real-yet also impossibly remote, 9,000 miles away, a dark hallucination. And along with the war on the tube came the rest of the theater of the '60s: riots, assassinations, the antiwar moratoriums, the Yippies' carmagnoles, the circus of the counterculture.

By the late '70s, those eruptions seemed as long ago as the Great Awakening or the Indian wars. Besides the sheer passage of time, there appeared to be a willful repression of the nation's longest war and its only military defeat. The forgetfulness amounted almost to national amnesia. Two or three years ago, literary agents would tell their writers: "I can sell anything you do, but not about Viet Nam." Except for a foolishly frisky little combat comedy called The Boys in Company C, Hollywood would not touch the war-unless you count John Wayne's 1968 Green Berets, which might as well have been produced by William Westmoreland. As Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) put it several years ago, "I don't believe the war in Viet Nam can be treated in a 'popular film.' We have no capability to confront events of that enormity head-on." It was taboo, a secret, like a spectacular case of madness in the family.

But now the psychological time-lock on Viet Nam seems to have expired. 'Books have been tumbling out of typewriters, laden with confessions, accusations and revisionist history. American foreign policy, which for much of the '70s has suffered from a post-Viet Nam, post-Watergate reticence and drift, has grown somewhat more assertive; there are even signs of a backlash of truculence in some quarters.

Viet Nam was thrust into the forefront of most Americans' consciousness last week in a surprising but somehow fitting manner: at the Academy Award presentations witnessed by an estimated 70 million TV viewers in the U.S. So it was movies and television again that brought the war back: the technological media of illusion fancifully reconstructing what was in some ways the most illusory experience in the national history.

Ordinarily, the Academy Awards are a nice, long evening's wallow in the junk culture; you send out for Chinese food or pizza, make popcorn, keep score, watch for the awful fashions and the stilted soliloquies of acceptance. But this year, beneath the usual wisecracks and show business sentimentality, there was more interesting drama. Jane Fonda, anathematized for years because of her radical politics and trip to Hanoi during the war, won the Best Actress award for her role in Coming Home, an antiwar film focused sympathetically on the suffering of wounded American veterans. (Fonda, who is relentless, gave half of her acceptance speech in sign language "because there are 14 million deaf people in this country." New York Daily News Critic Rex Reed wrote bitchily that it "looked like an audition for The Miracle Worker. ") Jon Voight, who played opposite Fonda as a paraplegic vet, won the Best Actor award.

At the end of the 3-hr. 20-min. ceremonies in Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, John Wayne himself came on. The old martial role model, looking gaunt but energetic, his stomach and one lung gone to cancer, presented the Oscar for Best Picture of 1978. It went to another Viet Nam movie, The Deer Hunter, Director Michael Cimino's story of young Ukrainian-American steelworkers from Clairton, Pa., who play pool, drink beer, watch football on TV, get drunk at a wedding, hunt deer and then go off to fight the war in 1972. It was the fifth Oscar for The Deer Hunter that night. The audience could only guess at the complexities of feeling that ricocheted around John Wayne's mind as he handed over the prize.

The Motion Picture Academy in years past has displayed a distaste for political controversy; half a decade ago, a streaker was more acceptable than an Oscar winner with the temerity to rail against the war. But as a headline in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner put it last week.

THE WAR FINALLY WINS. The awards to two films about Viet Nam suggested not so much that the academy has gone hot-headedly controversial as that it judged, like the rest of the nation, that Viet Nam has receded enough to keep any discussion of it from exploding into a civil war.

The heat is by no means gone, of course. Outside the awards ceremonies, a remnant group of Viet Nam Veterans Against the War shouted protests about The Deer Hunter, which in style and message is a world away from Coming Home. The vets echoed the criticism of many old antiwar activists, who regard Cimino's cartoon treatment of the Vietnamese (played in the movie, incidentally, by Thais) as screaming sadists, much given to atrocity. Fonda called The Deer Hunter "a racist, Pentagon version of the war" -a judgment she reached without having seen the movie. Gloria Emerson, who covered the war for the New York Times and wrote a phosphorescently indignant book called Winners and Losers, declared last week: "Cimino has cheapened and degraded and diminished the war as no one else."

Coming Home has at least the charm of its political clarity; it is a straightforwardly and movingly antiwar movie that is saved from being a mere tract by its rich performances and its compassion for the Americans who fought and suffered in the war. The Deer Hunter is far more elusive-more forceful, less coherent, more artistically ambitious but also dangerously close to political simplism, historical inaccuracy and moral kitsch.

The fascinating difference between the two films is that The Deer Hunter presents a version of the American experience in Viet Nam that is utterly at variance with the view, widely held among intellectuals, of barbarously overarmed Americans, a nation of William Galleys, doing battle against the frail, gentle, long-suffering Vietnamese. Cimino's victims are the rambunctious guys from Clairton, blue-collar heroes who took their wholesome patriotism to Viet Nam and there found themselves alone, morally adrift among savage Southeast Asian exotics who are forever forcing them to play Russian roulette. There is no record or recollection, incidentally, that the game was ever played during the American years in Viet Nam, although some old hands recall a few episodes in the '20s and '30s.

Cimino's tale may or may not be a bad description of what happened in Viet Nam; it depends on one's politics. It is the implication of American innocence that enrages some critics of the film. Partly the difficulty lies in trying to extrapolate a general statement of American performance in Viet Nam from the in dividual American stories that Cimino presents. The director, now working in Montana on a new film about the immigrant voyages west, speaks bitterly of Fon da's charges about his film. His characters, says Cimino, "are trying to support each other. They are not endorsing any thing except their common humanity -their common frailty, their need for each other." Although it may be reading the film too much as allegory, the ending, with the survivors back in their shab by Pennsylvania steel town, sitting around a table and softly singing God Bless Amer ica, has the effect of being an absolution, a subtle exoneration of the American role in Viet Nam. Cimino might have intended the scene more as an exoneration of the men who were called on to fight there than of the policymakers who sent them. But that is not necessarily the psychological effect upon his audiences. In any case, as Cimino rightly says, "It will take a lot of films to get at Viet Nam. It's still very mysterious to us."

Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, in any case, are only the beginning. Still to come is Francis Ford Coppola's long delayed $35 million Apocalypse Now, opening in August. Coppola has based the film on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Dark ness, translating the tale of savagery and evil from the Congo to Viet Nam. There, Marlon Brando, playing the Mr. Kurtz character, is a renegade Army colonel who has taken over a remote province and set up his own war against the Communists. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent to assassinate the rebellious Kurtz. The movie is already 1 1/2 years behind its original release date and millions of dollars over budget. Coppola has gambled his own reputation and the considerable fortune he made from his Godfather movies on the film's success.

Television is attempting a Deer Hunter of its own: Friendly Fire, an ABC made-for-TV movie based on C.D.B. Bryan's 1976 nonfiction book (April 22, 8 p.m.). Carol Burnett and Ned Beatty play an Iowa farm couple who turn against the war when their son is killed by an errant U.S. artillery round in Viet Nam. As their anger grows more obsessive, they gradually alienate their lifelong friends and even their own family. In Bryan's book, the process is deeply moving, but the TV version is cluttered with cliches and civics lessons. The best TV show about the American involvement in Asia remains CBS's Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H -and M*A*S*H, though controversial by old TV standards, is antiwar in a context shorn of politics and anesthetized by the bedside black humor and reassuring personalities of its principals.

Playwright David Rabe's trilogy The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones and Streamers, explored military brutalizations in the Viet Nam era. This week in Manhattan Actor Michael Moriarty is opening in David Berry's play G.R. Point, an equally brutal work about men doing graves registration duty in Viet Nam. Its refrain: "The 'Nam hasn't got any heroes. Dead is dumb, and dead in the 'Nam is the dumbest of all."

More and more examinations of the war are also being published. The best of the war novels and memoirs, in many ways, is Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977). Herr, who spent a year in Viet Nam covering the war for Esquire, writes prose that resembles some weapon the Pentagon developed especially for Viet Nam-hallucinatory, menacing, full of anxiety, death and a stunning, offhanded sort of accuracy. Herr is a writer with the talent of a smart bomb. Like James Webb in his fairly straightforward 1978 novel Fields of Fire, Herr is able to locate the thing inside the soldiers, and himself, that enjoys the appalling charm of war. Writes Herr: "But somewhere all the mythic tricks intersected, from the lowest John Wayne wet dream to the most aggravated soldier-poet fantasy, and where they did I believe that everyone knew everything about everyone else, every one of us there a true volunteer. Not that you didn't hear some overripe bullshit about it: Hearts and Minds, People of the Republic, tumbling dominoes, maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever-encroaching Doodah; you could also hear the other, some young soldier speaking in all bloody innocence, saying: 'All that's just a load, man. We're here to kill gooks. Period.' "

Philip Caputo's 1977 memoir, A Rumor of War, another excellent and painfully earned book, recalls how he was inspired by John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." Caputo joined the Marines: "Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence." At the end of his three-year enlistment, Caputo writes, "I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51 ... Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses-a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people."

There have been other admirable Viet Nam books recently: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters and Frederick Downs' The Killing Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will be a major, successful Catch-22-stylG novel and film about Viet Nam. Only then will we be far enough away so as to see behind the grotesque and see how miserably and squalidly funny the whole thing was."

Movies, TV shows, plays and memoirs will eventually construct a mythic reality around the American experience in Viet Nam. World War I's catastrophic trench warfare, which nearly wiped out a generation of England's best and brightest men (France's and Germany's as well), was so utterly new and unfamiliar that a highly literate assemblage spent the next decade, at least, formulating a conception of what it had all been about. Something of the same process is occurring regarding Viet Nam.

Meantime, events in Indochina and the labors of revisionist historians and other experts with second thoughts are bringing the American tragedy there into a new perspective. The war that was fought so much with symbols in the American mind has now acquired an entirely new set of symbols: the boat people fleeing and drowning, former South Vietnamese soldiers in re-education camps ringed with barbed wire, Pol Pot's murderous regime in Cambodia. When the French were colonizing Indochina in the middle of the 19th century, the Vietnamese were just in the process of conquering Cambodia. Now they have invaded again, and have subordinated Laos as well, advancing that much closer to a possible Vietnamese elevation to the status of overlord. Their move against Cambodia spurred the Chinese, who supported Hanoi through the long American war, to invade the northern provinces of Viet Nam just after normalizing relations with the U.S.

The psychological effect on Americans of all this crisscross Realpolitik is to lift a lot of the moral burden off the American involvement. At the least, it seems less tenable to hold that the U.S. was guilty of the uniquely satanic imperialism that antiwar critics often saw-and still frequently see-behind American policy. The new conflicts in Southeast Asia add an element of retrospective perplexity to analysis of what the U.S. was doing there.

New voices of reconsideration are heard. Jean Lacouture, the French journalist and biographer of Ho Chi Minh and long an expert on Viet Nam, has now called for "trials" of Communist crimes in Indochina since 1975, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army. Guenter Lewy, a University of Massachusetts political scientist, fired what may be the opening shot of a revisionist view of the war in his 1978 book, America in Viet Nam. Lewy examines the process of U.S. involvement and concludes that though the performance was unsuccessful, it was legal and not immoral. Leslie Gelb, now the State Department's director of politico-military affairs, makes a persuasive and subtle case in his new book, The Irony of Viet Nam: The System Worked. Despite his inflammatory (to war critics) title, Gelb's thesis is limited and, as he says, ironic: "American leaders were convinced that they had to prevent the loss of Viet Nam to Communism, and until May 1975 they succeeded in doing just that. It can be persuasively argued that the United States fought the war inefficiently with needless costs in lives and resources. As with all wars, this was to be expected. It can be persuasively argued that the war was an out-and-out mistake and that the commitment should not have been made. But the commitment was made and kept for 25 years."

In a sense, the formal foreign policy lessons that the U.S. learned from Viet Nam have been easier to absorb than the deeper psychological and personal meanings, which will be years in unfolding. Says Columbia University Historian Henry Graff: "America has learned for the first time that not everything it attempts comes off successfully. What we regarded as decency, honor and pride were not implemented in the world satisfactorily to make others see us as we thought we ought to be seen. That this could have happened to us is what The Deer Hunter is really all about."

After Viet Nam, John Kennedy's "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship ..." formula rings like the penny-bright, dangerous rhetoric that it was. The old policy of containment is, of course, long dead, as is the corollary view of a Sino-Soviet Communist monolith probing ever outward. It was precisely the containment-monolith-domino view of geopolitics that led the U.S. into Viet Nam. Says Henry Kissinger: "We've learned two somewhat contradictory things. One, that our resources are limited in relation to the total number of problems that exist in the world. We have to be thoughtful in choosing our involvements. Secondly, if we get involved, we must prevail. There are no awards for losers." Anthony Lake, director of the State Department's policy planning staff, uses more cautious phrasing: "What Viet Nam should have taught us is to be very clear-eyed about our interests and the situations we are getting into when we use our military power. It should not have taught us that we should never use our power. We should be very careful about doctrinaire answers or lessons-either that we should have intervened anywhere, any time orin response to our Viet Nam experience-that we should not intervene anywhere any time."

In all, the U.S. seems to have become more cautious and considered in international politics as a result of Viet Nam. Allies, especially in Western Europe, have adopted a somewhat schizophrenic line toward the U.S., first condemning its Viet Nam War policies as obnoxiously aggressive, now worrying its policies elsewhere are contemptibly weak. Says former Under Secretary of State George Ball: "Rather than snickering at America's alleged impuissance, our allies should rejoice that we have now achieved the maturity they accused us of lacking during our Viet Nam adventure."

It is the psychological, moral and spiritual adjustment that has proved more difficult and problematic. Some, of course, believe Americans are an oblivious people, who have simply cruised on and learned nothing. "We have no national memory," Lillian Hellman once told Gloria Emerson. "Maybe it's a mark of a young and vigorous people. I think we've already forgotten Viet Nam." When William Westmoreland, former U.S. commander in Viet Nam, appears on campuses these days, he finds "total change. Crowds are larger, open-minded. Now there's very little criticism, and mostly from professors." Of course, the kids Westmoreland is addressing would have been only about eight years old at the time of the Tet offensive. To them, he could almost be talking about Carthage.

Viet Nam fragmented America into constituencies that even now identify themselves according to their war grievances. The veteran vs. draft resister issue can still stir anger. William Keegan, now 29, a steel-foundry worker in Churchill, Pa., served for a year in Viet Nam as a medic after being drafted. He says bitterly: "The real heroes seem to be the guys who ran away to Canada to dodge the draft. Where will the country be if we ever face a crisis again? We'll have a heck of a time getting people to fight, and other countries know this." But many draft resisters, slipping into their 30s, also sense their communities' distaste, the snarls of veterans from the nation's more straightforward wars. Still, this month brought at least a modest symbol of reconciliation when Robert Garwood, the Marine private who spent the past 14 years in Viet Nam and may be formally charged with collaborating with the enemy, came home to Greensburg, Ind. His townspeople carefully refrained from passing any judgment on him; they warmly welcomed him back.

One of the heaviest casualties of the Viet Nam War was trust in institutions, in experts, in majorities and consensus. That deep-dyed skepticism, born in the great credibility gaps of the war and Watergate, is one of the most profoundly significant effects of Viet Nam. Says Dr. Ronald Glasser, a Minneapolis physician who, after his Army service, wrote 365 Days, one of the finest evocations of the war: "The present inflation, Watergate, our lack of belief in expertise, our confusion, all of these things came out of that war. When someone tells me a nuclear power plant has six back-up systems, I'm immediately suspicious."

To Walter Capps, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "Viet Nam means that patriotism can never again be understood in the simple way it was before." It was a loss of innocence for a people accustomed to regarding themselves as uniquely virtuous-so much so that some of them took to seeing themselves as uniquely evil. As Critic Morris Dickstein has written: "In Viet Nam, we lost not only a war and a subcontinent; we also lost our pervasive confidence that American arms and American aims were linked somehow to justice and morality, not merely to the quest for power."

In an interview not long ago with Public Television's Bill Moyers, the poet Robert Ely argued that Americans have yet to experience a necessary catharsis: "We're engaged in a vast forgetting mechanism and from the point of view of psychology, we're refusing to eat our grief, refusing to eat our dark side, we won't absorb it. And therefore what Jung says is really terrifying-if you do not absorb the things you have done in your life, like the murder of the Indians and bringing the blacks in, then you will have to repeat them. As soon as we started to go into Viet Nam, it was perfectly clear to me that what was about to happen was that the generals were going to fight the Indian war over again."

Yet there has been dislocation, loss and grief. Dr. Harold Visotsky, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University, speaks of the "loss of youth, damaged lives, loss of the chance to be young-jumping from youth to middle age." Such losses were sustained by a comparatively small part of the population, of course-the poorer, less visible young men who could not escape the draft through college.

Some psychologists believe Viet Nam was like a death in the American family; it may demand that the country somehow go through the various stages of mourning: denial, anger, depression and finally acceptance. "If people don't mourn," says Loyola University Psychologist Eugene Kennedy, "they have other problems. Many of our problems now stem from wanting to be quit of Viet Nam but not wanting to work through it. We still tend to deny it: we don't want to hear about the lives sacrificed, and who they were-that they were not'the boys in college, but that we sacrificed the sacrificeable ones."

Visotsky, a bit grandiosely, calls movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter "Hollywood's version of our Nuremberg trials." But it is much easier for a people to try its defeated enemies than to sit in intelligent judgment on its I own defeat. Victory requires only an idiot grin; defeat demands patience and improvisational wit. Americans should not become impatient with the stages of their adjustment to fallibility. It may be that America's most profound moral experience was the Civil War, but as both races understand, the nation has scarcely begun to absorb all of its implications. -Lance Morrow

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