American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  It was a tough slog. Fund-raising gained little traction and there were few legislative successes. VVA president Bobby Muller, a former marine lieutenant who returned from Vietnam a paraplegic, grew increasingly frustrated. One day in 1979, he discussed the lack of support for veterans with McGeorge Bundy. Bundy, one of the principal architects of U.S. escalation in Vietnam, was then the head of the Ford Foundation. He sympathized with Muller, but was pessimistic that the VVA could attract substantial economic support from foundations and philanthropies: “You’re the symbol of that war,” Bundy said, “and that war causes powerful people in this country to be uncomfortable and because of that they’re not going to support you.”

  Powerful people never did provide sufficient support for Vietnam veterans, but the Iran hostage crisis clearly marked the beginning of a growing public acknowledgment of their service. In January 1981, the very day that former hostages paraded through Manhattan under a storm of ticker tape, Bobby Muller’s phone began to ring off the hook. Ordinary people were calling to ask how they might be able to support Vietnam veterans. Muller’s own mother called to tell him that a former hostage from Houston had been given “a Cadillac and free passes to the ball games. What did anybody ever give you? Nothing.”

  The hostage homecoming triggered the gradual emergence of a broad desire to repair the social and political divisions of the Vietnam War era by honoring Vietnam veterans. The most obvious expression of this 1980s phenomenon was the construction of hundreds of Vietnam veteran memorials in towns and cities throughout the nation. The most famous of these was the memorial that opened in the nation’s capital in 1982—the Vietnam Wall.

  Initially, the design for the memorial ignited a firestorm of controversy, reopening many of the bitter divisions of the war. Some veterans and pro-war conservatives disdained the design as a “black gash of shame,” a “degrading ditch,” a “nihilistic slab.” The National Review complained that a V-shaped wall would honor the peace symbol, not veterans. An uglier strain of criticism was aimed at the designer herself, a young Chinese American, Maya Lin. Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt was so outraged by the design he initially refused to issue a building permit. Memorial organizers sought to appease critics by adding a more traditional artistic element to the site. They commissioned an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of three armed and uniformed American soldiers. Initially, they wanted to place it at the apex of the Wall but eventually agreed to put it in a grove of trees apart from the memorial. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, a statue of three nurses tending to a wounded soldier, was added to the site in 1993. The controversies over the memorial faded, and it soon became a broadly celebrated site of national healing.

  That was, in fact, the explicit purpose of the organizers, a group of Vietnam veterans who formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The memorial, they wrote, “is conceived as a means to promote the healing and reconciliation of the country after the divisions caused by the war.” They pushed for a form of commemoration that would avoid making an explicit political statement about the war. To regain national unity, they believed, Americans would have to learn how to “separate the warrior from the war.”

  This concept caught on so effectively it soon became a cliché. As long as Americans identified Vietnam veterans with the divisive war they fought, it would be impossible to find agreed-upon ways to honor them. The organizers of Montana’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (dedicated in 1988), put it this way: “The memorial makes no political statement regarding the war or its conduct. It will transcend those issues. The hope is that the creation of this memorial will begin a healing process between all factions.”

  Along with all the memorials came a spate of retroactive “welcome home” parades for Vietnam veterans. In 1985, for example, a dozen years after the last American soldiers had returned from Vietnam, a reported one million people gathered on the sidewalks of New York City to cheer a contingent of 25,000 Vietnam veterans marching through the streets. It was a “thunderously appreciative crowd,” observed the New York Times. One veteran who wore his war medals said, “It’s the first time I took them out of the closet. I was kind of ashamed to wear them, but not today. Today I’m not ashamed.” The article does not identify the source of his former shame except to imply that it had its roots not in the war, but in the reproach he received from fellow Americans. The very men who had “braved the bullets of the enemy” had also suffered the “opprobrium of their countrymen.”

  This was the main thrust of a small mountain of articles and reports in the 1980s that described the surge in public efforts to acknowledge, honor, and memorialize military service in Vietnam. The key points were these: Vietnam veterans were unjustly spurned by their fellow citizens and now deserved unconditional respect and honor. Whatever anyone might think of the brutal and unpopular war these soldiers were sent to fight, all Americans should applaud their willingness to serve.

  American veterans could now be portrayed as the primary victims of the Vietnam War. The long, complex history of the war was typically reduced to a set of stock images that highlighted the hardships faced by U.S. combat soldiers—snake-infested jungles, terrifying ambushes, elusive guerrillas, inscrutable civilians, invisible booby traps, hostile antiwar activists. Few reports informed readers that at least four of five American troops in Vietnam carried out noncombat duties on large bases far away from those snake-infested jungles. Nor did they focus sustained attention on the Vietnamese victims of U.S. warfare. By the 1980s, mainstream culture and politics promoted the idea that the deepest shame related to the Vietnam War was not the war itself, but America’s failure to embrace its military veterans.

  Not everyone bought it. Some veterans viewed their belated hero status as empty symbolism, an inadequate substitute for more meaningful forms of support. Others worried that the commemoration of vets impeded a critical reexamination of the war. It did. Many young Americans who came of age after the Vietnam War believed that the primary lesson of the Vietnam War was to pay homage to U.S. veterans. They also picked up a related, often unspoken, message: Don’t ask too many questions about the war, because it might disturb people, especially veterans. Recalling her childhood in the 1980s and early ’90s, a college student said her only images of Vietnam were the TV shots of veterans at the Wall on Memorial Day or Veterans Day, embracing and crying. She wondered about the war they fought, but didn’t ask. “I had the feeling you weren’t supposed to ask questions about Vietnam. It’s like some dark family secret that nobody wants to talk about around the children.”

  By the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Americans had become habituated to a memory of Vietnam as an American tragedy. For a growing number, “Vietnam” was a wall of American names rather than a distant Asian country struggling to rebuild after decades of devastating war. The damage the United States had inflicted on Vietnam receded deeper into the background.

  About two weeks after the Gulf War began, three academic researchers conducted phone interviews with a random selection of 250 citizens in Denver, Colorado. They asked people to respond to President Bush’s statement that the current war would not be like the one in Vietnam because U.S. troops would not have to fight with “one hand tied behind their back.” Seventy-nine percent supported the statement. The Denver survey also asked people to estimate the number of Vietnamese who were killed in the Vietnam War. The median answer was 100,000. The Vietnamese government estimates that 3.4 million Vietnamese died in the war.

  That same year, 1991, U.S. history’s bleakest public symbol of American victimhood was enshrined by law. Never has such a gloomy image been displayed so prominently—not on our coins, our statuary, or our national monuments. It is a black flag—the POW/MIA flag—and in 1991, by an act of Congress, it was ordered to be flown over every federal building in the country. It is on permanent display in the Capitol’s rotunda, a stark contrast to the historical paintings and statues meant to ennoble a glorious past. It is the only flag be
sides the Stars and Stripes ever to fly over the White House. Most states adopted a similar law, ensuring that the flag remains omnipresent, visible not only at post offices and VA hospitals, but at public universities, town halls, and state buildings.

  The flag is mostly black. In the center is a relatively small white circle, dominated by the black profile of a man’s head. The head is bowed forward, a dark, featureless cameo of anonymity and isolation. A guard tower looms in the background and behind the man’s neck runs a strand of barbed wire. It is as if we are peering into a distant prison camp through binoculars. Above the circled head are the letters POW*MIA. At the bottom: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN.

  The 1991 law gave the POW/MIA emblem an official national status never conferred on any flag other than the American. The law declared the banner “a symbol of our Nation’s concern and commitment to resolving as fully as possible the fates of Americans still prisoner, missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia.” As that language makes clear, the flag was not intended to draw attention to the memory of Americans from all wars whose fates remain “unaccounted for.” If it had, our thoughts might turn to the Civil War, in which nearly half of the dead—hundreds of thousands—were never identified or recovered. Our concern would also embrace the 78,000 Americans still missing in action from World War II, and the 8,000 unaccounted for from the Korean War. The number missing from the Vietnam War was relatively small—about 2,500.

  Yet the POW/MIA flag was designed exclusively to focus attention on Americans unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. More important, the flag promotes the assumption that some of America’s missing in action might still be alive as POWs. It encourages citizens to believe that decades after 591 U.S. POWs were released from Vietnam in 1973, an untold number of Americans still suffer in captivity, still stand with heads bowed in some distant prison camp surrounded with barbed wire and guard towers. Neither the flag nor the law that keeps it flying says precisely how many Americans are “still prisoner” in Southeast Asia. Could all 2,500 of the MIAs actually be POWs? Five hundred? Ten?

  Yet even if just three or four Americans were left behind in torture chambers, why wouldn’t the government move heaven and earth to get them back? “You Are Not Forgotten” might be some consolation to the families of men who had died, but it offers little hope to the families of men who might still be imprisoned. After all, the motto isn’t “You Will Be Found and Rescued!” The flag law merely acknowledged a national commitment to resolve “as fully as possible” the “fates” of these lost men. Where was the Delta Force?

  For true believers in live POWs there could be no closure until every last man was accounted for and returned home, dead or alive. For them, the rhetoric of national healing and reconciliation was insulting. For them, the war was not over. Although many of these activists had supported the war in Vietnam, they increasingly viewed the federal government as a giant bureaucracy founded on lies, conspiracies, and cover-ups.

  In truth, there has never been any credible or verifiable evidence that American POWs were held after 1973. But it has been one of the most widely believed myths of the post–Vietnam War decades. It has been kept alive, in part, by the U.S. government’s hypocritical and inconsistent response. At times it has encouraged the belief in live POWs, at other times it has rejected it. In 1976, for example, a House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia concluded that “no Americans are still held alive as prisoners in Indochina” and that a “total accounting” of the missing in action “is not possible and should not be expected.” But just a few years later President Ronald Reagan promised that “the return of all POWs” was “the highest national priority.” He even endorsed a few covert operations into Laos to seek photographic evidence of live POWs.

  The original seed of the POW myth was planted during the war itself by President Nixon. He often spoke as if Hanoi was holding American POWs as bargaining chips, as if it was unusual for warring nations to keep prisoners until the war had ended. In 1971, Nixon said, “It is time for Hanoi to end the barbaric use of our prisoners as negotiating pawns.” At times he suggested that the war had to be continued to “win the release” of American POWs. All the other reasons for prolonging the war had been discredited, but Nixon shrewdly understood that no one could object to the necessity of getting our POWs back.

  The Nixon administration helped organize and fund the National League of Families of Prisoners and Missing in Action in Southeast Asia, perhaps the most influential small lobby in American history. Though Nixon used the league to support his war policies, its loyalty would not endure. Eventually, the league turned against the government. Many of its members came to conclude that the White House had hard evidence of live POWs in postwar Vietnam but kept it secret. The government, they claimed, wanted to bury the sordid memory of Vietnam, even if it meant abandoning its own men.

  Even Ronald Reagan disappointed them. For all his rhetoric, he delivered no POWs. But like Nixon, Reagan made great political use of the subject. His criticisms of Vietnam for not providing a “full accounting” of MIAs and “possible” POWs reinforced his Cold War priorities and policies. It served as a case study of Communist perfidy. It provided retroactive vindication of U.S. intervention. If the Vietnamese were cruel enough to hold American prisoners long after the war, wouldn’t everyone agree that America was right and noble for trying to defeat them? The specter of POWs also provided the perfect justification for ongoing hostility toward Vietnam—the continuation of an economic embargo, denial of access to aid and international loans, and opposition to diplomatic relations.

  The POW myth—and the vision of sadistic Communist torturers it upheld—also reinforced Reagan’s larger foreign policy goals: vast increases in military spending, the first-term rejection of détente with the “Evil Empire” (the Soviet Union), military support to right-wing Central American governments (and their death squads) that fought left-wing insurgencies, and support for the Contra war against the Marxist government of Nicaragua.

  Though the National League of Families was a small organization, its faith in live POWs was not the oddball belief of a tiny cult of conspiracy theorists. A 1991 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that 69 percent of Americans believed U.S. servicemen were still being held against their will in Indochina. How could more than two-thirds of Americans believe such an unproven claim? A big part of the answer is that the U.S. media—including Hollywood—gave credence to much of the “evidence” put out by the National League of Families and other POW/MIA activists, including Senators Jesse Helms, Charles Grassley, and Bob Smith. In 1991, Smith circulated a photograph of three men he claimed to be live U.S. POWs in Indochina.

  The media rushed to embrace the new “evidence.” Newsweek, USA Today, and newspapers all over the country gave the photo front-page coverage. It took a few months for the photo to be completely discredited as a fraud. The doctored photograph had originally been published in a 1923 issue of Soviet Life and included a portrait of Joseph Stalin that was artfully removed. The media later admitted that the photo was a fake, but Congress was already enshrining the POW/MIA banner as an official American flag and opening yet another congressional investigation.

  The robust market for “evidence” of live POWs attracted hucksters from around the world ready and able to sell phony “live sightings,” dog tags, and photographs. None of it convinced the Senate investigators. They came to the same conclusion the House reached back in 1976—there simply were no American POWs in Vietnam. But by then, the hard-core POW activists did not have a shred of faith in the government even though the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs included six Vietnam veterans.

  Only Hollywood was able to produce live American POWs in the post–Vietnam War decades—imaginary ones. In a cycle of 1980s films, including Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), fictional veterans returned to Vietnam to rescue their former comrades from bamboo cages, slaugh
tering hundreds of evildoers in the process. Film critics complained that the movies were cartoonish, mindless, racist, gratuitously violent, and utterly improbable, but enthusiastic audiences packed theaters to watch the spectacle. Along with all the standard action-adventure fanfare and violence, the POW films offered a partial redemption of the Vietnam War—a chance to refight it with a clear objective, a just cause, and a triumphant ending.

  In Uncommon Valor, for example, Colonel Cal Rhodes (Gene Hackman) pumps up his small squad of Vietnam veterans with this pep talk:

  You men seem to have a strong sense of loyalty because you’re thought of as criminals because of Vietnam. You know why? Because you lost. And in this country that’s like going bankrupt. You’re out of business. They want to forget about you. . . . That’s why they won’t go over there and pick up our buddies and bring ’em back home. Because there’s no gain in it. . . . Gentlemen, we’re the only hope those POWs have. So we’re going back there. And this time, this time nobody can dispute the rightness of what we’re doing.

  And this time they would succeed. All the POW films promoted the postwar claim, championed by President Reagan, that the United States had lost the original war only because soldiers had been “denied permission to win.” John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) expresses this view most famously in Rambo II when he asks his commander, “Do we get to win this time?” If all your information about the Vietnam War came via the POW films of the 1980s you would have to conclude that there had once been a massive conspiracy to betray American soldiers by ensuring their defeat. The conspiracy included a bizarre mix of gutless politicians, self-serving bureaucrats, cowardly draft dodgers, greedy businessmen, man-hating feminists, and the media.