The transformation of the Vietnam veteran on television since 1980 is part of the more general rehabilitation of the popular image of the United States military. During the 1970s films and television portrayed the military as a corrupt, bloodthirsty institution. While enlisted men were occasionally presented as decent people, officers were invariably pictured as incompetent, self-serving, and destructive. “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it,” Captain Willard remarks in Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979. And in the same movie, Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore orders his men into battle to secure a strip of beach that offers him good surfing. In films released from 1980 through 1982—Private Benjamin, Taps, Stripes, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Lords of Discipline— Hollywood revitalized the military. It is not a machine for killing boys; it turns boys into men, or in the case of Private Benjamin, remakes a spoiled girl as an independent woman.
In part, the promilitary films reflect the economy of the late 1970s and early 1980s. High-paying jobs in heavy industry were becoming scarce, and there was little glamour or money in flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s. For many young Americans the military became a desirable alternative. Enlistments in the armed forces jumped in the 1980s, and enrollment in ROTC programs doubled. The mood of Reagan’s era, its overt patriotism and promise of restored greatness, contributed to the popularity of the films. It contrasted especially with the malaise and perceived impotency of the Carter years. Americans yearned for a return to greatness. They wanted a military with teeth, equipped to act and fortified by a commitment to a higher code.
As Americans reappraised the Vietnam veteran and the military, they also attempted to understand the war itself. Aided by the illegally released Pentagon Papers, they searched for its causes.
During the 1960s and most of the 1970s two schools of thought emerged. One held that the war, in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s words, was a “tragedy without villains.” It resulted from unfortunate decisions made by well-meaning officials. The other judged the war to be more deliberately malign, the result of an imperialistic American foreign policy. William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and Gabriel Kolko presented the nation’s past as a history of expansion and domination and argued that at least since the turn of the century it had been establishing its hegemony over the Pacific. The Vietnam War marked a setback in this policy of expansion, but the decision to fight in Vietnam was very much a part of it.
During the 1980s a third school of historical thought gained ascendancy. It maintained that the war was an honest and straightforward expression of American commitment to democracy and liberty. And the military could have won the war. “The sense of guilt created by the Vietnam War in the minds of many Americans,” declares Guenter Lewy’s America in Vietnam, published in 1978, “is not warranted and the charges of officially condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance.” The loss of Vietnam was not the fault of the troops. Civilians back home, both inside and outside the government, had failed to understand what the war was about and refused to live up to their country’s honorable commitment to South Vietnam. Of course, this perception reflected the changing political face of the United States. By 1980 politicians were once again talking about falling dominoes and the obligations the United States had to countries struggling to stay free. In 1980 Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the nation had “an inescapable duty to act as the tutor and protector of the free world.”
Some neoconservatives have argued that a full use of conventional weapons and tactics would have brought victory. This view requires two assumptions that LBJ in the 1960s had been unwilling to make: that the Chinese, involved in their own cultural revolution and possessing a weak economy, would never have invaded Vietnam as they had Korea and that neither they nor the Soviet Union would have employed atomic weapons in South Vietnam. These quite accurate conclusions are clearer today, however, than they were in the mid-1960s when the world was caught in the grip of cold war determinism. Only a decade before the United States had buried some 50,000 Americans killed in Korea. Harry G. Summers in his work On Strategy, published in 1982, argues, with some degree of persuasiveness if military questions alone are to be considered, that the United States had weakened the Vietcong guerrillas by 1968 and that the mistake of the allies was to fail to cut off the sources of supplies for the communists in the south. This would have involved, among other tactics, a naval blockade of the port of Haiphong—and not “let a grain of rice nor a single bullet” enter the country on a Chinese or Soviet ship—and an occupation of southern parts of North Vietnam. In answer, partisans of the antiwar movement observe that Summers ignores a main point of the military strategist General Karl von Clausewitz, in his classic Principles of War, to whom he appeals: that wars are ultimately political. Certainly the anticommunist effort was a political disaster within both the Vietnamese and ultimately the American public. Critics claim that Summers overlooks the persistence with which the Vietnamese over the centuries have resisted foreign occupation, and the advantage the communists possessed of choosing at every moment where to attack and how extensively. They also recount a conversation Summers himself had conducted with a North Vietnamese officer. “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,” Summers said. Responded Colonel Tu: “but it is . . . irrelevant.” Nor does Summers take into account the strategic advantage Hanoi and the insurgents enjoyed of being able to chose when and where to engage the Americans, and their ability to rely on the discomfort of the public at home about supporting a lengthy and badly explained war.
In ideology, too, defenders and critics of the Vietnam War miss the point. The behavior of American troops was admirable, for the most part, under difficult circumstances. But the anticommunist cause, which included the commendable belief that freedom and pluralism are superior to totalitarianism, came up against an equally commendable belief on the part of the communists that Vietnam required a massive redistribution of power and wealth. Would an anticommunist victory have brought a regime of constitutional liberty? Did the communists achieve economic democracy? The reasonable answer in both cases would have to be pessimistic. In the end, about the only generalizations on the American intervention are that it was based in Cold War thinking that had made much sense in the early days after the end of World War II, and that it never addressed the social and political realities of Vietnam.
In the public at large, where a search for comprehension of the Vietnam War continued as it did in academia, many of the novelists who wrote about the war had served in Vietnam, and for them the whole business was a moral, practical, and intellectual swamp. Raised on World War II films that ooze moral certainty and enshrine a sporting ethos and the notion of fair play, these writers confront in Vietnam a world of shadows and moral ambiguities. Their schoolboy rules belonged to a distant continent. “It was the dawn of creation in the Indochina bush,” declared Philip Caputo in 1977 in A Rumor of War, “an ethical as well as a geographical wilderness. Out there, lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state.” The same sense is expressed in Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato, which he published in 1978. His protagonist doesn’t know who is right, or what is right; he doesn’t know whether it is a war of self-determination or an institutionalized madness of self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he doesn’t know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he doesn’t know whether nations will topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he doesn’t know who started the war, or why, or when, or with what motives; he doesn’t know whether it matters.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now attempted to translate that confusion into a narrative film. “The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now,” Coppola wrote in the program notes for the film, “was to create a film experience that would give the audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam War.�
�� Captain Willard’s voyage up the river into the “heart of darkness”—the film draws on Joseph Conrad’s great story of a man, named “Kurtz” like Marlon Brando’s character, who has traveled into his own heart of darkness—is as much a quest for answers as it is a mission of death. In trying to understand the sanity behind Colonel Kurtz’s insanity, Willard is attempting to fathom the logic of the illogical conflict. Everywhere there is madness. The coldly unemotional military and civilian officials who tell Willard that Kurtz’s mentally disordered command must be “terminated with extreme prejudice” are mad. They speak the language of madness; the meanings of their words cannot be found in a dictionary. Kilgore is mad. He attacks the enemy not to win the war but to secure a good surfing beach. “After seeing the way Kilgore fought the war,” remarks Willard, “I began to wonder what they had against Kurtz.” And Kurtz, well, he is quite mad. He is like a computer fallen into Alice‘s Wonderland and fed bits of incoherent data. His response to his environment is to become insane, for as the film demonstrates, only the insane survive.
Apocalypse Now may be the best film about the war, and its theme of madness is unquestionably accurate on a psychological level, but it does not help the viewer understand how or why the United States became involved in the war. It does not deal with what the war accomplished or how it changed the country. Its major political criticism is aimed not at the war itself but at its management. Willard describes his superior officers as “a bunch of four star clowns who are giving the whole circus away.” He openly sympathizes with the outlaw Kurtz: “Charging someone with murder in a place like this is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indianapolis 500.”
Of all filmmakers in the decades since the end of the war, Oliver Stone has been the most committed to a full understanding of the conflict, the American Homer of the Vietnam War. Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola made a film about the war and then moved on to other subjects. Stone has brooded over the conflict, seeking to get inside the war and its political and cultural origins. A veteran of the war who experienced combat, he understood that the war was a complex reflection of American society that defied easy understanding and glib definitions.
Stone’s Platoon, released in 1986, explores the physical nature of the war. From the dust and heat to the ants and the mosquitoes, Vietnam is a land of creeping, crawling, biting, stinging insects, a place where long stretches of boredom and sudden outbursts of violence go hand in hand. Born on the Forth of July details the martial culture in the United States that embraced the war. From John Wayne movies to competitive sports, Stone suggests, American males were conditioned to follow orders and go to war. In JFK, which appeared in 1991, and Nixon four years later, Stone moved from cultural anthropologist to historian. In both films he delves into the political roots of the war. Embracing popular conspiracy theories and speculations on the order of what-if, he argues that the worst of the war could have been prevented—would have been prevented—if a combination of politicians and industrialists had not been bent on power and profits. His Heaven and Earth, released in 1993, traces the physical and psychological impact of the war on Vietnam and the United States. Wars, he suggests, don’t end when peace treaties are signed. The leave scars, deep and raw, that require decades to heal, if they heal at all.
It is in dealing with the fact of defeat that filmmakers become most perplexed. Most of the films depict a thoroughly corrupt or stupid officer corps. But beyond this limited explanation of failure few producers have been willing to go. Part of the reason is financial; industry leaders have feared that Americans would not pay to watch a film about their country’s losing a war. During the 1970s amid a mood of self-criticism in the country, few films about the war were made. And when producers turned to the subject of the war, the age of self-criticism had passed. The Reagan years affirmed patriotic values. Heroes dominated popular culture. The rock star Bruce Springsteen, at a concert in Dallas, expressed frustration that his anti-Vietnam megahit “Born in the U.S.A.” had actually become, in the popular mind, a patriotic anthem.
The best expression of this new mood is Sylvester Stallone’s films First Blood, which appeared in 1982, and Rambo: First Blood II, screened three years later. In the earlier film John Rambo is an ex-Green Beret mistaken for a hippie. By nature a loner and even a peaceful man, he is forced by a series of inept government officials to defend his freedom in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The movie suggests that men like John Rambo did not lose the war; politicians back home did. In the climactic scene Rambo tells his former Special Forces commanding officer: “Nothing is over, nothing! You just don’t turn it off. It wasn’t my war— you asked me, I didn’t ask you . . . and I did what I had to do to win— but somebody wouldn’t let us win.” Yet there is no examination of just what “winning” in the context of the war in Vietnam means. It is enough for Rambo and his audience that the war could have been won. In the second film Rambo returns to Vietnam to find and rescue Americans missing in action from Vietnam—a popular scenario in the mid-1980s that was central to films released during the decade. But Rambo was really returning to Vietnam to win the war. When Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna), his former commander, tells him, “The old war’s dead, John,” Rambo replies, “I’m alive. It’s still alive.” And later Rambo asks, “Do we get to win this time?” Trautman answers, “This time it’s up to you.” And since winning is again never defined, Rambo rewrites history. He wins.
Complete redemption of the American military did not really occur until the outbreak of the Gulf War. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into the tiny, oil-rich nation of Kuwait. The invasion threatened Saudi Arabia and the vital sea lanes of the Persian Gulf, through which most of Japan’s and the Western world’s oil flowed. President George H. W. Bush carefully constructed a coalition backed by the United Nations and ordered Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. When Saddam Hussein refused to withdraw, the president ordered a massive military buildup. On January 17, 1991, after giving the Iraqis another chance to retreat, Bush unleashed Operation Desert Storm. Allied bombers pounded Iraq, and Iraq forces in Kuwait, for more than five weeks, and on February 24 the ground offensive began. The war was over four days later—a stunning victory for the military.
General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander of Allied forces, had conducted a brilliant military campaign, crushing Iraqi forces and achieving a public relations tour de force. Americans watched navy and air force pilots carrying out pin-point bombing campaigns using laserguided “smart bombs,” marines storming Persian Gulf beaches, and armored divisions sweeping across the deserts of the Middle East. When the war was over, the GIs returned triumphant to a grateful nation. Whatever images of an incompetent military still lingered in American popular culture were rapidly put to rest. And in the victory parades that took place across the country in 1991 and 1992, thousands of Vietnam veterans spontaneously joined the marchers down Main Street, getting the attention they had deserved, but never received, during the Vietnam War era.
While American filmmakers Ramboized the conflict, Vietnam labored to construct a nation out of the rubble of war. American bombing had destroyed the infrastructure of Vietnam. Roads and bridges, power plants and factories lay in ruins. Ports suffered from damage and neglect. For a generation the resources of Vietnam had been used to fuel the war machines. Conversion to a peacetime economy presented difficult, at times almost insurmountable, problems. Raw materials were scarce, and investment capital had left with the Americans. Machines imported from the United States broke down, and spare parts were impossible to obtain. Along with hope, peace brought the specter of economic ruin.
Vietnamese communism smothered the country with a stifling bureaucracy. The communists tried to implement Ho Chi Minh’s dream: political reunification of the two Vietnams and imposition of a socialist economic order. North Vietnamese cadres and Vietcong took control of South Vietnam, seized private property, collectivized plantations and farms, squeezed out small businesses, and hunted
down South Vietnamese political and military officials. The government forcibly moved nearly one million civilians from Ho Chi Minh City, Hue, Danang, and Nha Trang to “New Economic Zones” in abandoned sections of South Vietnam. Blessed with a strategic location, a huge capacity for producing rice, and an enterprising people, the SRV declined into Third World poverty complete with high unemployment, crippling food shortages, and starvation. Along with the direct results of the war—hundreds of thousands of orphans, paraplegics, and amputees, and the physical destruction wrought by the American military—the ideology of communism rendered as a system of massive control at the hands of a party bureaucracy transformed Vietnam into one of the poorest countries in the world. The average worker made the equivalent of 300 dong a month in 1980. That same year a pair of cotton trousers cost 400 dong and a new bicycle 20,000 dong. Malnutrition became a normal condition. As one Soviet professor in Vietnam privately confided, “How much poverty in Vietnam? We have nothing like this in Moscow. Their party has made so many mistakes.” The SRV also failed in its attempt to de-Westernize the country, replacing capitalist with socialist habits. A number of critics even contended that southerners “Westernized” northerners. The official party newspaper Nhan Dan warned that the “new-colonial culture” of the south was “expanding to the north” and threatened to “spoil our younger generation and wreck our revolution.” French food, American beer, and Western ideas became blackmarket commodities. Governmental corruption, always a staple in the south, wound its way north. As one loyal northerner admitted, “I’ve been a Communist all my life. But now, for the first time, I have seen the realities of Communism. It is a failure—mismanagement, corruption, privilege, repression. My ideals are gone.” The worst of capitalism, it appears, had mated with the worst of collectivism.
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