American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Alexander Arredondo enlisted one month before 9/11, with no war on the horizon. Three years later, in August 2004, on his second tour of duty, Alex was killed in Najaf, Iraq. When two marine officers arrived at his father’s home to deliver the horrible news, it seemed to Carlos as if they were speaking in slow motion. They “used only like three words, but it was like the whole dictionary. . . . My heart went down to the ground. I stopped breathing. I just couldn’t believe what they were saying.” Shattered by grief, Carlos grabbed a gas can and propane torch, climbed into the marine van, splashed himself and the van with gasoline, and lit the torch. As the van went up in flames, the marines pulled Carlos out. He was badly burned and nearly died. Nine days later, on a stretcher, he attended Alex’s funeral.

  In the years that followed, Carlos became a fervent peace activist and, in 2006, an American citizen. A member of Gold Star Families for Peace, he often traveled around in a truck that was a “memorial on wheels” to Alexander and others who had died in Iraq. Carlos adorned it with every imaginable remembrance and relic of his dead son’s life—childhood toys, Winnie-the-Pooh, a soccer ball, flowers, angels, combat fatigues, boots, military medals, even a blown-up photograph of Alex at his wake, lying in his open coffin in his marine dress uniform. He also hauled around a full-size coffin covered in an American flag. Carlos was determined to confront people with the losses it was so easy for most to ignore. “As long as there are marines fighting and dying in Iraq, I’m going to share my mourning with the American people,” he told a reporter in 2007.

  The losses, for the Arredondo family, only deepened. In 2011, just before Christmas, the second son, Brian, hanged himself from the rafters of a shed in the backyard of his mother’s house. It was not the first time he had attempted suicide. After Alex’s death Brian began a long slide into depression, drug abuse, and violent encounters. His suicide came one day after U.S. troops were officially withdrawn from Iraq.

  On April 15, 2013, Carlos was in Boston to support fifteen National Guardsmen who were marching in the Boston Marathon with forty-pound packs in honor of American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. This “Tough Ruck” team began its walk at 5:00 a.m. and crossed the finish line moments before the bombings that killed three people and wounded hundreds of others. They immediately rushed in to help the victims. So did Carlos Arredondo.

  He was captured in a photograph the media instantly declared “iconic.” It shows Carlos in a cowboy hat striding quickly alongside a wheelchair with his mouth open and his eyes fixed. His intense focus draws your eye. In the wheelchair sits a grievously wounded young man, ashen-faced and vacant-eyed. The man’s legs are clearly mangled, though most media outlets did not show the worst of it, cropping the photograph just below the knee so you can’t see that his lower legs have been blown away. If you look closely at Arredondo’s right hand you can see that he is pinching off an artery that is jutting from the young man’s thigh.

  Arredondo’s life experience makes vividly clear that many people who “support the troops” can also be deeply critical of the wars they are sent to fight. Cindy Sheehan is another example. She, like Carlos, joined Gold Star Families for Peace, having lost her son Casey in Iraq. In August 2005, Sheehan and some 1,500 other grieving parents and supporters set up a camp near President George W. Bush’s Texas ranch in Crawford, Texas, while he was enjoying a five-week wartime vacation. She was there to demand that Bush offer a plausible explanation for the war in Iraq, since every public pretext had proven false. She wanted Bush to admit that we were in Iraq for oil and to assert U.S. imperial power in the Middle East.

  Cindy Sheehan and Carlos Arredondo had actually become by then more representative of the nation—of “who we are”—than President Bush. The prior year, 2004, a CBS/New York Times poll found that only 18 percent of Americans believed Bush was telling the full truth about Iraq. By June 2005, nearly 60 percent told pollsters the war in Iraq was not worth fighting and almost three-quarters said the casualties were unacceptable. A year later, in 2006, 72 percent of U.S. troops in Iraq said the United States should withdraw within a year. From August 2006 until U.S. military disengagement from Iraq in December 2011, at least 60 percent of Americans said they opposed the war. In many polls, opposition climbed to the high 60s.

  That level of dissent is remarkable given the stunning initial impact of 9/11. Many people favored immediate retaliatory aggression. Just a few days after the horrifying attacks, Congress passed a resolution called the Authorization for Use of Military Force with only one dissenting vote. It gave the president the power to use “all necessary” force “against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” It was, in other words, a blank check allowing the president to wage war anywhere he decided.

  But most Americans were not willing to defer to the president indefinitely. In the months before Bush launched his “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, millions of protesters came together in small town squares and major cities throughout the United States and the world to demonstrate against the impending war. These massive demonstrations—the largest global outpouring of antiwar dissent in history—were an unprecedented effort to stop a war before it could start.

  Opposition soared despite one of the most intensive sales jobs in U.S. history. The Bush administration made its pitch for war with unequivocal arrogance. It said it knew with absolute certainty that Iraq possessed vast stockpiles of hideous weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate and dire threat to global peace. The WMD included, it claimed, “thousands of tons” of mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas, anthrax, botulinum toxin, and possibly smallpox. Iraq had all that and more, the world was told, with nuclear weapons just around the corner. Anyone who challenged those claims was ridiculed.

  Oddly, however, U.S. war planners did not seem especially worried about what all those WMD might do to their own troops. Having described Iraq as a lethal threat, they berated those who thought the war might be costly. As one adviser put it, victory was assured; the war would be a “cakewalk.” There would be no need for an enormous force of three or four hundred thousand troops. Nor would U.S. casualties be high. Nor would the war be expensive—“something under $50 billion,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced. When Vice President Dick Cheney was asked if he worried that an invasion of Iraq might lead to a long Vietnam-like war against a hostile populace, he replied: “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators . . . I think it will go relatively quickly . . . weeks rather than months.”

  The flagrant contrast between the administration’s prewar lies and arrogant assurances and the war’s daily realities of car bombings, firefights, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and every possible form of human insecurity and suffering led to a rapid decline in public support. Although dissent was at least as broad as it was during the Vietnam era, there was not the same level of visible public protest. One reason is that the Internet provided so many semiprivate forms of protest. Instead of taking to the streets, people could go online to sign petitions, send around antiwar articles, or write their own. The 2011 Occupy movement was vivid and surprising in part because so many people were willing to come together in public protest and stay there.

  Another explanation is that military service fell on such a small fraction of Americans, less than 1 percent of the population. Many troops served multiple tours of duty. It was easy for most Americans to ignore the war even while opposing it. Casualties mounted, but many Americans did not know anyone who had died or was wounded. Nor did most young Americans have to worry that they, too, might be ordered to fight. There was no draft looming over their lives. During the Vietnam War, that threat had haunted an entire generation. Since the adoption of the all-volunteer force in 1973, it was possible to forget about distant wars altogether. They were outsourced to others.
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br />   Nor were older Americans asked to contribute anything to the Global War on Terror. In fact, even as President Bush was initiating the war in Afghanistan and planning one against Iraq he encouraged citizens to get back to the “business of America.” Better yet, they should “fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida,” the president urged. “Take your families and enjoy life.”

  Citizens were not called to service, they were sent on vacation. It was an especially strange message at a time when pundits were claiming that 9/11 had “changed everything,” that the country would never be the same. And it clashed with the president’s post-9/11 foreign policy—the Bush Doctrine—which seemed to suggest that the business of America was not to “enjoy life” but to prepare for a future of unlimited military interventions.

  The apparent contradiction was resolved by a single obvious fact: the public was not to have anything to do with the president’s foreign policy. The public had no role, but its exclusion included a payoff—it would be expected to do nothing. It would not have to fight. It would not even be expected to pay higher taxes to pay for the war. The Bush tax cuts would be preserved and the trillions of dollars required by the Global War on Terror would be paid with loans. The rich would continue to get richer. As the United States depended on an ever-smaller minority to do its fighting, the richest 20 percent came to own 84 percent of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 60 percent owned less than 5 percent.

  During the Vietnam years, there was a powerful political movement to address the most blatant economic and racial inequalities in American society. Though LBJ’s Great Society never had the reach or funding to achieve its most ambitious goal—“to end poverty in our time”—it did help reduce the number of very poor Americans from 22 percent in 1963 to 13 percent in 1973, precisely the period when the American war in Vietnam was fought. The recent wars have been fought in a time of broadening inequality and economic crisis, capped off by the Great Recession, which began in 2008.

  These distant, outsourced wars, fought as most Americans were struggling just to get by, were also profoundly confusing. It required close attention simply to understand some basic facts about the histories, cultures, religions, and factional disputes of Afghanistan and Iraq, particularly since Washington made no effort to distinguish or clarify them and media coverage declined as the wars continued. And it soon became clear that the United States was waging war in other nations as well with equally confusing histories. When Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down and killed in 2011, he was ensconced in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

  The war in Vietnam also had complicated details, yet many Americans had remained politically and emotionally engaged with that war for years. Millions empathized deeply with the suffering in Vietnam and some on the political left identified with the anti-American guerrillas, or at least with their fantasy of who they were. They chanted with approval, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF [National Liberation Front] is going to win!”

  By contrast, almost no one in the United States cheered for the anti-American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. (In a final bit of irony, back in the 1980s it was the U.S. government that had actually supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran and also armed the rebels in Afghanistan who fought the Soviet Union and would later fight the United States.) The insurgents in both countries were so divided you needed a scorecard just to keep track of the key groups. And since the various tribal and religious sects did as much violence to each other as to the Americans, it was nearly impossible to identify a group that seemed capable of uniting their country and fostering peace. No U.S. protesters were recorded chanting in favor of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.

  In the 1960s, many Americans were outraged by the lies officials told about Vietnam largely because there had once been such widespread faith in the government’s claims about supporting freedom and democracy around the world. Vietnam taught subsequent generations to have a more skeptical view of how American power is exercised. Americans are no longer so shocked when their government prosecutes unsuccessful wars in distant places on false pretexts. Fewer people are surprised when evidence of U.S. wrongdoing surfaces, and fewer people feel so utterly betrayed. There is also a widespread belief that the military-industrial complex is permanent and unchangeable and will continue to operate by its own rules regardless of public opinion or media scrutiny.

  That view was put most frankly by a Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove). He derided the “reality-based community,” people who judged the government based on a “judicious study of discernible reality.” But “that’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too. . . . We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

  It is hard to imagine a more brazenly authoritarian description of executive power, especially from a White House insider. We are told that the government not only makes all meaningful decisions, but has the power to create whatever “reality”—real or illusory—it wants. Everyone else is left to stand aside and watch.

  Equally striking is the claim that the United States is “an empire now.” No modern president has ever dared to acknowledge that reality. Successful American politicians routinely deny imperial ambition or power. The story they prefer casts the United States as a reluctant giant. Global responsibility was thrust upon a peace-loving nation. America’s exceptional institutions, values, and resources required it to assume world leadership. No other nation could be trusted to play the role so benignly. At the highest levels of power, that has remained the official claim in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

  Since 9/11, however, many Americans from across the political spectrum have begun to acknowledge their nation’s imperial status. Some on the political right share the left-wing concern that American empire is a bad thing—expensive, destructive, and antithetical to republican institutions. Yet many others have embraced the goal of global hegemony. The only common grievance among right-wing advocates of empire is that the United States is too timid in asserting its power. For them, America is not imperial enough.

  A typical example came from the Weekly Standard only one month after 9/11. In “The Case for American Empire,” Max Boot took on those who claimed that the terrorist attack against the United States was a consequence of American intervention in the Middle East going back to the early days of the Cold War. The attack was not an example of blowback, but the “result of insufficient American involvement and ambition.” The correct response to terrorism, Boot claimed, was “to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.” We had not acted “as a great power should.”

  For Boot, the model to follow was the British Empire of old. “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” Historian Niall Ferguson agreed. The problem, however, was that the United States, unlike Britain in its imperial prime, was unwilling to exercise its global power with sufficient gusto. For Ferguson, U.S. incompetence as an empire stems from its failure to understand and embrace its imperial ambitions. “The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.”

  In 2003, for example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Al Jazeera, “We don’t do empire.” But as Ferguson rightly points out, “How can you not be an empire and maintain 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth?” The failure to own up to empire, he argues, makes the United States particularly dangerous and inept. Although it often intervenes with massive military power, it fails in the task of nation building because it does not want to impose full control. Ferguson takes it as a given that the United St
ates could establish order and democratic rights if it tried.

  That’s where his argument collapses. He does not account for the enormous success of anticolonialism in the last century and the failure of one great power after another to maintain imperial control. Ferguson blithely suggests that the United States need only increase the size of its occupying forces, and its will to use them, and all would be well. On another cheerful note, he views a larger military as a means to employ a great deal of the nation’s “raw material”: “If one adds together the illegal immigrants, the jobless, and the convicts, there is surely ample raw material for a larger American army.”

  There haven’t been such upbeat advocates of American empire since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. But recent decades have also inspired an influx of new anti-imperialists. Two of the most interesting—Andrew Bacevich and Chalmers Johnson—did not begin to question the fundamental legitimacy of American foreign policy until the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Bacevich served as a junior officer in Vietnam, and Johnson was an Asia scholar who consulted with the CIA during the 1960s. Both had believed that waging war in Vietnam was justified by the Cold War conflict with Communism.