VIETNAM: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE LEGACY WHEN THE BABY BOOMERS DIE?

 

Will the Lessons Be Forgotten?

Jason Sokol is a freelance writer. He is a graduate student in history at Berkeley.

Ruminations on the Vietnam War have dominated the pages of recent newspapers and magazines, and most every writer has taken his or her shot at distilling the legacy of the war, the protests it spawned, and the generation it molded. My parents belong to this generation. They marched on Washington, and both remember their antiwar activities as important moments in their lives. I, in turn, was brought up with the songs, tales, and symbols of that distant war and bygone era. But when my parents get on in years, when the grips of baby boomers can no longer be felt, what will then be the legacy of the war that defined them?

What will live on in me, and one day, in my children? What will be passed down through the centuries? When all those who lived through the war, who came of age in rice paddies or mass demonstrations are no longer around to provide first-hand accounts, to bombard us younger Americans with words and images of this dark and definitive chapter of our past, what will be left in our midst? What about Vietnam will continue to resonate in the rest of us?

David Halberstam began to sketch one type of answer to these questions in the Sunday Boston Globe when he wrote, "If there was long-standing damage done in Vietnam ... it took place in two institutions critically important to this country: the Democratic Party and the United States Army." It is difficult to refute that the Democrats and the Army were never the same after Vietnam, that both suffered blows from which they are still reeling. But Halberstam's article, and many more I read that Sunday, also hinted at something much deeper than political parties and the military.

The types of passions incited by the war have not been felt since. Like many in my generation, I wonder whether I will ever experience such heights of political emotion. While Vietnam's lessons about foreign policy debacles and our own nation's mortality are vital, I think the print the war will leave on our collective consciousness is of a more indelible sort. Vietnam will always speak to a time in which political decisions directly touched the lives of millions, when so much seemed at stake. Today, we can hardly conceive of a political issue powerful enough to divide fathers and sons. And as the war eroded the ties between many, so did it unite millions in a common opposition. The reaction spawned by Vietnam demonstrated that as static as the rules by which we live may seem, they can -- indeed, they must -- constantly be changed.

American protesters responded not only to the specter of being drafted, but to the apparent injustice of the war and the accompanying treachery of American leaders. From the first bomb to the last, Vietnam was a lattice of lies -- and not only white lies, but those that resulted in millions of deaths. Lyndon Johnson launched all-out war on North Vietnam after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. The party line was that a U.S. destroyer had undergone an unprovoked attack in international waters, and Johnson's retaliation plunged America into a full-scale war. It is still unclear as to whether the American ship had been attacked, but it is certain that the North Vietnamese were provoked by C.I.A. action. Throughout all of this, the American public was kept in the dark.

In a 1965 address at Johns Hopkins University, Johnson outlined his reasons for war. "Helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks. Large-scale raids are conducted on towns, and terror strikes in the heart of cities." Johnson was listing the supposed atrocities committed by North Vietnam, but he might as well have been speaking of his own army. "We hope that peace will come swiftly," he continued. "But that is in the hands of others beside ourselves." Johnson declared, "This generation of the world must choose: destroy or build, kill or aid, hate or understand."

Time and again, lies justified atrocities and cover-ups ensued. Johnson claimed that only "military targets" were bombed; in fact, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians lost their lives in such raids.

Through the mid-'60s, Washington maintained that victory was near. On January 31, 1968, the Tet Offensive proved this false when N.L.F. troops stormed the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Americans glimpsed a confident and determined enemy, not the weak one they had been assured would soon be defeated. "I thought we were winning this thing!" CBS anchor Walter Cronkite incredulously exclaimed. After Tet, public protest would greatly increase. It was becoming clear that the war was not only unjust, but unwinnable. What Johnson began, Richard Nixon proliferated. In the spring of 1970, Nixon and Henry Kissinger embarked on a protracted invasion of Cambodia, the truth of which was not publicly disclosed. This escalation of the bombing belied Nixon's campaign promise to end it.

When Martin Luther King finally came out against the war in 1967, he spoke at New York's Riverside Church: "Somehow this madness must cease. ... I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours." Throughout, protesters played a crucial role in the cessation of the war. From forcing L.B.J. not to seek re-election in 1968, to public outcry over the Kent State shootings in 1970 and the concurrent national student strike, to the vilification of Richard Nixon, American dissent crippled the war effort as much as Viet Cong guerrilla warfare. This led New York Times correspondent C.L. Sulzberger to write, "We lost the war in the Mississippi Valley, not the Mekong Valley."

Perhaps my parents and their peers did not achieve lasting change by marching and protesting -- but their actions sustain the notion that democracy is only healthy when people stand up for what they believe. Almost a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, "Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched -- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society."

The disaster that was the Vietnam War, and the public opposition that it provoked, was most profoundly an exercise in finessing the boundaries and thus discovering the health of American democracy. We found that many leaders were autocratic, and that many more young men died in a futile war conceived in error and nurtured by deception. That those who have power in America will stop at little to maintain it, and will often throw the opinion of the masses and the welfare of millions by the wayside in pursuit of illusory goals while mired in a deluded logic. But apart from the legacy of deceitful leadership and senseless bombing, of one country decimated and another torn in half, my hope is that Vietnam will leave my generation, and those after it, with a far more emboldening legacy. Perhaps the message that will remain through the ages is this: That uncompromising criticism of our own society, and of those who lead us, is paramount. If our nation is still a democracy, and if it possesses any semblance of a soul, this surely must be it.

Published: May 25 2000