AFTER THE CRUSADE

By TOBIAS WOLFF

I WAS LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO WHEN SAIGON FELL, TEACHING high school. I picked up the paper after work and read it during the bus ride home. So. It was over, almost seven years to the day since I finished my own tour of duty in that already ancient war. When you've served in a war, gloriously or not-not, in my case-you are bound to take an interest in the news that your side has lost. I found nothing surprising in the reports of how effortlessly Saigon had been taken. But there was this picture: a helicopter perched on a mere nub of a rooftop in the city, its crew chief reaching down to help someone up a ladder while a long line of people wait below for their own chance to escape. A joke of fate that the very machine that was supposed to guarantee our victory should prove the means of our retreat.

It didn't occur to me that this photograph would become the enduring image of our failure in Vietnam. But it worked strongly on me, and still does: that wide-open sky waiting above the helicopter like freedom itself; the dark line of people bearing their hopes of deliverance; the apparent fragility of the craft, its precarious roost, the spindliness of the rotors on which all these hopes depend; and most eloquent, the figure of the crew chief silhouetted against the empty sky, pulling some fearful soul from one life into another, as we had set out to do by other means so many years before.

If I found nothing to be surprised at in the fall of Saigon, of Vietnam itself, it was because the war had already been lost by the time I got there in the spring of 1967. The suspicion that this was so came upon me not as a thought but as a deepening unease at the way we treated the Vietnamese and the way they treated one another. I hadn't been 10 minutes off the plane at Bienhoa before I saw one of our troops abusing the baggage handlers; the bus driver who ferried us to the transit barracks spent most of the trip screaming insults at the people on the road, and nearly made good on his threat to run down an old woman who was slow getting out of his way.

That was just the beginning. Everywhere I went I saw Americans raining contempt on Vietnamese, handling them roughly, speaking to them like badly behaved children, or dogs. In time I learned to do it myself. Fear was our teacher; it taught us some bad lessons, and taught them well.

Still, it was obvious to even the rosiest fantasts that we couldn't win this war by simple force of arms, that the real battle was for the trust and loyalty of the common man. We knew this, but our anger and fear kept getting the better of us. Why didn't they get behind us? Why didn't they care that we were dying for them? Yet every time we slapped someone around, or trashed a village, or shouted curses from a jeep, we defined ourselves as the enemy and thereby handed more power and legitimacy to the people we had to beat.

The government soldiers were worse. Their army suffered from a corruption so pervasive and timeworn that it had become institutionalized: officers didn't get paid enough money to live on because it was assumed they'd make up the rest by graft. Their soldiers had it even harder, and they passed on their sufferings, with interest, to the people they were supposed to protect. They went into the field not to fight but to oppress. There were exceptions of course. Some officers and men were honest and compassionate; some of their units fought well. Most didn't.

The war could have been won only through the most heroic moral discipline. To prevail, our side had to prove to the people that we were serving a coherent and humane vision of the future, that we cared more than our enemies did about them. But by 1967--long before then, in truth--the South Vietnamese government had suffered a catastrophic moral collapse. Same with the army. This was plain to the Americans serving there and didn't exactly stiffen our own resolve. Who wants to get killed or crippled so that bullies and thieves can go about their business in safety?

Whatever innocence we had left came to an end during the Tet offensive of 1968. The scale of the offensive surprised us and frightened us, and brought to a boil all the bitterness we felt toward the Vietnamese people--how could such a massive operation have been carried out without their knowledge and complicity? After the first shock passed, we opened the gates of hell on that country, and we didn't spend much time making distinctions between enemies and friends. Entire towns were destroyed, others devastated by our jets and artillery. Most of the dead were civilians. In this way we taught the people--and taught ourselves, once and for all--that we didn't love them and wouldn't protect them, and that we were prepared to kill them all to save ourselves.

This recognition cost us dearly. American soldiers don't go to war in the spirit of mercenaries or legionnaires; we have to think of ourselves as crusaders. It may be self-delusion, but a sense of chivalric purpose is essential to our spiritual survival when we find ourselves called upon to kill others and risk being killed. In its absence we become at worst cynical and corrupt, at best simply professional. After Tet we were legionnaires, but legionnaires couldn't win over there, as France had already learned. The war had been fought in the soul, and lost in the soul, long before the fall of Saigon.

The last battle ended 20 years ago, but if the end of a war is peace, we're still waiting for it. The communist regime in Vietnam was so harsh and vengeful in the aftermath of its victory that more than 800,000 people took flight, hundreds of thousands on the open sea rather than remain at home. We haven't finished fighting it out here either. Even in the toxic atmosphere of our political discourse, it is hard to imagine another issue that could inspire a Congressman, speaking on the House floor, to accuse his President of treason.

A few years ago, I was invited to join a group of men who were meeting every other week or so to talk about Vietnam. Three of us had served there. Of the others, one had been a conscientious objector; another had got lucky with the draft; a third had been too old for Vietnam but was active in the antiwar movement. Though our circumstances had placed us in very different, even conflicting positions, nobody was of a mind to find fault with anyone else. Indeed, the other two veterans had both become pacifists some years back.

We came together with the best will in the world, but as soon as we began to talk, it grew obvious that our experiences had opened distances between us that no amount of goodwill could bridge. One of the veterans, a former captain, had been in almost continuous combat; the men under his command were shot up and killed so regularly that he couldn't keep track of them. One day he told us about sending out the body of an 18-year-old only a few hours after the boy had joined the unit. "What was I supposed to tell his parents?" he said. "I hadn't even met him." Then he added, in that tone of cold, slashing drollery soldiers use to mock their breaking hearts: "Tag 'em and bag 'em."

He is a man, as we all knew, of utmost gentleness and decency, but at that last phrase one of the nonveterans bridled a little; nothing was said, but our histories slammed down between us once again. The three of us who'd served couldn't help falling into a certain manner and language when recalling those days. "You're doing it again," one of the others said to us at such a moment, with rueful good nature. We understood him, but the old covenant was too strong to resist, and too dear.

That was the simplest of the divisions between us, but hardly the only one. My tour in Vietnam had been different from the former captain's. I could not follow him to that extremity of desolation where his memories often led; he was alone there. Nor could the lottery winner follow the conscientious objector to his outpost of remembrance. The more we talked, the farther away we seemed to be. And we weren't even arguing.

But the deepest fissures were those within us. Whether you went or not, that war put a crack in you because of the impossibility of finding an untainted response to it. If you protested the war, you couldn't help worrying about the bafflement and pain you were causing those in danger, and their families. How did you make peace with the fact that, however unintentionally, you were encouraging a hard, often murderous enemy who was doing his best to kill boys you'd grown up with? If you went, you had to notice that the government we were trying to save wasn't worth saving, and the people were generally uninterested in our brand of help. In time you might even come to see them as the enemy. Where did that leave you? And why did you go in the first place? From conviction, or from fear of being thought, and thinking yourself, a coward? How could you be sure? Only the most self-satisfied ideologues on either side of the problem could avoid questioning their own motives.

After four or five meetings, my discussion group decided to pack it in. We did so with a sense of relief, and humility. We had hoped to understand one another a little better; we hadn't expected to settle anything, to cast out any demons. But I think we were all a little chastened to find out how many demons there were, and how much power they still had to complicate even our affections and trust.

Ho Chi Minh City is filled with American capitalists now. There are nightclubs and discos and billboards. You can take a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels, squeeze off a few rounds with an AK-47, a dollar a pop. I've heard good stories from guys who've gone back. One of them visited the scene of his worst memories in the company of a former NVA officer who'd led an attack against his unit. There they were, together, walking the ground where they had tried to kill each other and where friends of theirs had died. And at the end of the day they managed to do what we at home have yet to learn to do. They shook hands.

One last look at the photograph, at the figure of the crew chief reaching down to the person on the ladder. There is such gallantry in his stance. It expresses in every line the strength and simplicity of his intent: to be of help. That's why we went there in the first place, and why this final image of our leaving touches me, in the end, with pride.

Tobias Wolff is the author of This Boy's Life and a recently published memoir of Vietnam, In Pharaoh's Army.