I was a young girl when I became aware of the Vietnam War. It was hard to escape the bits of information seeping into my consciousness through my parents regular viewing of the six o'clock news on the portable black & white television situated in the kitchen. We'd watch it each night while taking our evening meal. I remember at perhaps age nine, listening to Dan Rather and finally realizing what the nightly "casualty count" meant. After that realization and as the war continued taking lives, partaking of the evening meal was never the same for me.
I remember the day that I picked up Newsweek magazine off the coffee table and the cover bore a photograph of bloodied heaps of Vietnamese villagers. The story recounted the Mei Lei massacre. Stunned, I opened the magazine, first scanning the photos within, then reading the article, slowly grasping what the word "atrocity" meant but not understanding why our guys--the good guys--were involved.
This was the end of the 1960's and I had quite a bit of company in that realization--and in the questioning of why. Why were we over in that faraway land killing villagers? None of the Vietnam situation made any kind of sense to me. It shocked and horrified me and no matter what rationalizations I read or heard, I knew in my heart, in my gut, that this wasn't the right thing for us to be doing.
I'm not unique. Many other people have deeper impressions on their psyches and souls--the soldiers and their loved ones, just for starters.
As fate would have it, I grew up to marry a Vietnam veteran, a man 13 years older than me, one who served during the Tet Offensive. One with many scars upon his psyche and soul.
Is the Vietnam war relevant to the upcoming election for President of the United States?
Frank Rich's excellent opinion piece from the New York Times makes a persuasive argument in the affirmative.
nytdirect@nytimes.com
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Compiled 2 AM E.T.
FRANK RICH
You Can't Skip Vietnam Twice
THE IMAGE WAR John F. Kerry
being decorated in the 1960's.
Associated Press
George W. Bush in 1968 as his
father, George H. W. Bush, pins
lieutenant's bars on his Texas
Air National Guard uniform.
When George W. Bush's handlers had him dress up as the 1986 Tom Cruise of "Top Gun" to dance a victory jig on an aircraft carrier, they didn't stop to think that he might soon face an opponent who could be type-cast more persuasively in his own Tom Cruise role. John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade of Ron Kovic, whom Mr. Cruise played to great acclaim in the 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July." Mr. Kerry, like the movie's hero, was a decorated Vietnam soldier who became a star activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War upon returning home.
In a pivotal scene in the film, delegates at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach eject Kovic and his fellow protesting vets from the hall, call him a traitor and spit on him. If that incident has a certain angry passion, it may be because the director was Oliver Stone. Like both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, Mr. Stone was a son of privilege who attended Yale in the mid-1960's. Like Mr. Kerry but unlike Mr. Bush, he went on to combat in Vietnam, won a bronze star and then turned against America's most disastrous foreign war.
But just where was Mr. Bush during that convention fracas dramatized in "Born on the Fourth of July"? We still don't know. The summer of '72 is midway through the missing months in the president's résumé — a time when, in the still undocumented White House account, the young Mr. Bush was supposedly completing his National Guard service while campaigning for a senatorial hopeful in Alabama. Whatever the future president was up to, it is not inconceivable that he accompanied his candidate to Miami Beach, where he watched from afar as Mr. Kovic and his fellow veterans were dispersed in a paroxysm of tear gas and rage.
Cut to 2004. We want to believe that the wounds of Vietnam have long since been anesthetized by the panacea we call closure. Most Americans can probably no longer identify Nguyen Van Thieu or the Tet Offensive. Communism and the domino theory alike have been relegated to history's junk heap. And yet: even as the actual war fades in memory, Vietnam still looms as a festering culture war, a permanent fixture of the national collective unconscious, always on tap for fresh hostilities.
Whether before 9/11 or since, more Americans visit Maya Lin's memorial in Washington each year than they do the White House, the Washington Monument and the Jefferson memorial combined; no wonder it's the only aesthetic standard against which the ground zero memorial is measured. This year no fewer than two Oscar-nominated documentaries, "The Fog of War" and "The Weather Underground," take us back to Vietnam in all its anguish. And now, of all unlikely developments, Jane Fonda has been roped into a comeback. A movie star who hasn't been seen in a Hollywood feature in almost 15 years and who is best known to younger Americans as Ted Turner's ex-wife has been drafted into a political attack on Mr. Kerry: he appears as a blurred extra sitting several rows behind her in a photo of an antiwar protest held two years before her famous, self-immolating trip to Hanoi. This is guilt by association so loony that even the perpetrators of the Hollywood blacklist might have found it a stretch.
Mr. Kerry and his fellow members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War are now being attacked by Republicans as vociferously as Mr. Kovic's band of brothers were at the party's '72 convention. The head of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, which helped disseminate the Fonda picture, portrays him as a radical, a traitor and, worst of all, "hippielike." The Weekly Standard characterizes the antiwar Vietnam veterans of that time as "hairy men, many with `Easy Rider' mustaches."
There's a method to this archaic culture-war language. It's meant to complement the ubiquitous Vietnam-era photo of a decidedly clean-shaven, unhippielike Mr. Bush at the moment he is joining the Texas Air National Guard. The tableau shows Mr. Bush's beaming father, then a congressman, as he prepares to pin second lieutenant's bars to his son's uniform. But there's something wrong with this picture. It all too potently raises the unanswered question of just how the young Mr. Bush got into the guard, in those days a safe haven from combat duty, ahead of 100,000 others then on the national waiting list. At the time, 250 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam.
