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Some of us of Vietnam-war-era age, commonly known as baby-boomers because we were born in the ecstatic post-World War II euphoria, may remember that in 1992, Bill Clinton was the first of our generation to run for President, and one of the accusations flung at him by the GOP was that he was a draft dodger, and a draft dodger couldn't be commander in chief of the US military. This was right after the Gulf War that supposedly had banished the Vietnam syndrome from our national psyche.
Bill Clinton not only won in 1992, but he won over a gen-you-whine war hero, GHW Bush, and his national guard boy hero, Danny Quayle. At that time, Quayle's NG service was touted as legitimate, because after all, he could have been called up at any time and sent to Nam.
When Clinton, as C-in-C, presided over the Blackhawk down episode, his lack of military credentials became an issue, however briefly.
And, when Clinton in 1996 defeated ANOTHER gen-you-whine WW2 hero, Bob Dole, the whole issue continued to fester. Vietnam had never been addressed in the political arena, which is where it NEEDED to be addressed. Fortunately, Bill Clinton presided over an era of mostly peace and prosperity, and what little he did militarily was either overshadowed by sex scandal or dismissed as wag-the-dog.
In 2000, however, we had our first presidential race pitting two Vietnam era "vets" against each other. Lacking a wartime context, the 2000 race didn't focus on military issues. Gore was no "hero," and neither was Bush, and there wasn't a war on the horizon. The Balkans were quiet, the cold war was over. There were no enemies in sight. And remember that the right wing ideology NEEDS enemies. They can't exist without them. Without a declared enemy, the military backgrounds of Gore and Bush remained largely unexplored.
But after September 11, and after the start of offensive operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the issue of chickenhawks re-emerged. The generation that had fought and bled and died in Vietnam was now seeing its children sacrificed in a way they thought they'd never see again: sent to battle by sanctimonious blowhards who had themselves never seen war. The generation that in many cases hadn't even been able to vote during Vietnam was now coming of political age. The issue of military service in Vietnam is immensely relevant to the current political scene.
And I personally think no one understands that better than John Kerry. Unlike John O'Neill, Kerry learned the lesson that his country, the country he had volunteered to risk his life for, had lied to him and put him in a horrible situation for no good reason. Kerry understood, in a way neither O'Neill nor Bush were or are able to do, that serving one's country honorably is not the same as honoring that country's leaders with blind obedience. Kerry learned that serving one's country honorably may mean pulling aside the curtain to reveal its flaws -- the atrocities of a hundred hamlets in Vietnam or the atrocities of a prison in Baghdad.
Bush never learned the lessons, never experienced the horrors that shaped the Vietnam generation. He never knew the self-doubts, the self-hatreds, the fears, the grief. He lied about being in the Air Force and he lied about being in war -- and for many in our generation, even those of us who did not serve, that is a grave dishonor to the hundreds of thousands who did serve and the 58,000 who died.
The Civil War ended officially in 1865, but we all know from the voter purges in Florida that the plantation, segregation, racist sentiment has never died in some parts of the old south. I'm not going to get into a flame war over the confederate flag over this, but in many ways the lingering, festering wounds of the Civil War last so long because the victors -- the North -- were unable and/or unwilling to address the underlying issues. Much the same, IMHO, is true of Vietnam. Like the Civil War, Vietnam divided this country and without the catharsis of a full accounting, we cannot heal.
I think many on DU have read the few accounts by the wives, widows, children of Vietnam vets who were never able to speak of their experiences. Vietnam was a living nightmare to many, some who were there, some who weren't. We've read of the returning vets from Iraq who snap and kill their families and/or themselves. The same thing happened with Vietnam. We've read of the brutality in Iraq, and we know from Sy Hersh and the Toledo Blade and the Winter Soldiers that there was brutality in Vietnam.
In that sense, it's deja vu all over again, and we can't break the cycle until we face the horror that has been pushed into the farthest reaches of memory, until we accept the wrongs that were done by well-intentioned people, until we accept -- as the right wing is totally unable to do -- that the United States of America is an agglomeration of essentially fallible people, who sometimes make really horrible mistakes and then try to justify them, deny them, ignore them, forget them.
As a government, the U.S. never addressed the issues of Vietnam. The vets came home, many of them damaged in mind as well as body, and they were forgotten. No one wanted to hear their stories of shooting old men and children, of bayoneting pregnant women, of burning whole villages to the ground for no reason other than anger and frustration. "The enemy" did things like that, not Americans. We were the saviours of Europe and the Pacific, liberators, heroes. We weren't barbarians.
But Vietnam wasn't a war like any other we had fought, and the men (and women) who came home weren't always treated as heroes the way their fathers and grandfathers had been. So that's why the Swift Boat Vets' lies are bringing back the horrors to the minds of men who have tried for 35 or 40 years to forget. That's why the lies about John Kerry are so important to be exposed. John Kerry had his epiphany in Vietnam, but he at least he had it from experience. He's not a flip-flopper -- he's a man who has the self-presence and self-confidence to admit he has made or is involved in a mistake and then to go forward and try to correct it.
O'Neill and Bush never learned that. Neither did Cheney or Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz or Perle or Ashcroft or any of the rest of the evil GOP termites, gnawing at the framework of our noble experiment. And because the presidential race is between these two elements of the Vietnam experience -- the one who learned from experience and the one who believed what he wanted to believe without risk -- as a nation we have to revisit this and resolve it, or at least try to.
Because in the end, Vietnam is Iraq. If we don't as a nation and as a government learn the lessons of Vietnam once and for all, we will make the same damn mistakes in Iraq, and Iran, and North Korea, and Syria, and we will end up, as someone said, like 19th cnetury Paraguay, who waged war on all her neighbors until 90% of the male population was killed.
The men who are waging the war in Iraq right now are the same ones who avoided the war in Vietnam, not for the reasons Bill Clinton did because he thought the war was wrong. They avoided it because they had other priorities. They thought they were too good to fight. They thought they were entitled to the sacrifice of others. Now it is their peers who have come to challenge them. While it may be difficult for younger voters to understand why this ancient history is being dredged up, it is also important that they understand how history, even recent history, has shaped the world we have today.
Vietnam was never over. There was no victory, there was no surrender, there was no reconciliation. There was only pain and death and despair and anger and frustration and hatred and confusion and disillusionment. Maybe, just maybe, some of that will be resolved in the near future.
For the sake of our Vietnam war generation and for the Iraq war generation, I sure as fucking hell hope so.
Tansy Gold
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