One’s an anomaly, two may be a trend. First there were those elephants in the Seoul restaurant, now we have a herd of buffalo on a suburban Baltimore tennis court.
Apparently, like girls (and the rest of us), large mammals just want to have fun. Take in a restaurant every now and then, play a friendly game of tennis–it seems a small thing to ask. Note, too, that the tennis court is in an “upscale” neighborhood–these guys know the good life when they see it.
Some wonderful quotes, this time from Winston Churchill:
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened
Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
And from this site:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
“Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful can see it for what it really is – a strong horse that pulls the whole cart.”
“Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself by the handle.”
“My education was interrupted only by my schooling.”
“I utterly decline to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”
“Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, and still yet if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you, and only a precarious chance for survival. – There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
And here’s a website devoted to debunking Churchill myths, including quotations falsely attributed to him–among them, regrettably, the following favorite:
If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” There is no record of anyone hearing Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University makes this comment: “Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35! and would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal.
And yes, yes, I know that Churchill was not perfect. He had flaws. But I don’t demand that people be perfect. I happen to admire him greatly for his unflagging courage, his leadership during WWII (despite his understanding, shown in the fourth quote, that war is a difficult and unpredictable undertaking), his moral clarity about Nazism and Communism, his astounding ability to express himself in simple declarative English sentences that sound like the most powerful poetry, and even for the fact that he was well-rounded enough to have been a rather decent painter.
I also thank Churchill for having given William Manchester the inspiration for what may well be the best biography ever written, the two-volume The Last Lion. Certainly it’s the best incomplete one; it is a deep regret to me that Manchester died before writing the final volume of this work–which, even minus the last installment, constitutes 1729 hardcover (or 1792 paperback) highly readable and vastly entertaining pages.
There’s one other thing that has always struck me about Churchill. Unlike many great men, he was a loving husband and father–even though, like many of the children of fame, some of his kids ended up having problematic lives. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with one of his daughters:
Q: Did your father have time to show you affection when you were young?
LADY SOAMES: Both my parents were enormously affectionate, visibly so, and he was a great hugger, my father, and loved having us around. The stiff upper lip of the British upper class had really no part in our family life; it was something I read about in books. I may have been deeply shocked the first time I saw my mother cry, because that was as a result of a great drama in the family, but I often saw my father weep and it never struck me as odd that a man should express emotion.
Q: What kind of thing made your father cry?
LADY SOAMES: He was moved by events and tragedies, by people behaving nobly, by poetry … I’ve seen him recite Shakespeare and his eyes brimming with tears. He wept easily. He wasn’t ashamed of it.
An extremely unusual combination of characteristics were united in Churchill, a man for whom the word “heroic” can be applied without hyperbole.
Since we’ve been talking so much recently about Vietnam, this article, entitled “Why Go Now,” in the travel section of Sunday’s NY Times, caught my eye.
(By the way, the title of my piece, for those of you too young to remember, comes from the old lefty taunt/chant/hope of Vietnam War days: “Ho ho ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win”–a chant that I, as a liberal rather than a leftist, neither sympathized with nor recited.)
Here’s an excerpt from the Times article:
Why Go Now?–Because 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is finally growing up. With a prettified, gentrifying downtown, an array of international hotels and now direct flights from the United States via United, it has never been easier to visit. What’s more – and this may shock anyone who was mobbed by postcard vendors or stalked by optimistic cyclo drivers back in the mid-90’s – there has been an overall relaxing of the city’s aggressively capitalist nature.
Which is not to say that Saigon – as everyone from your maé®tre d’hé´tel to your moto driver calls it – has slowed down. Compared with the stately elegance of Hanoi’s French colonial streets and cafes, this city of six million remains brasher, more outgoing, more energetic – a New York City to Hanoi’s Washington. Eating, drinking and shopping are not just primary pastimes but full-time pursuits, and the streets are packed with 100 cc Hondas ferrying housewives and hip teens alike from cafe to market to nightclub. The constant noise and activity, plus frothy, hard-to-identify smells (grilled pork chops? diesel exhaust? durian?), can overwhelm even the residents, but just think to yourself: It’s like Manhattan with mopeds. And like New York, the city offers the chance to get lost in the bustle, and to emerge from it with your own personal map of the best back-alley banh mi sandwiches, the most secluded rooftop swimming pools and the perfect glass of iced coffee.
Now I know that it’s just an article in the travel section, and as such is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of current-day Vietnam, but it certainly seems to make the picture seem a lot rosier than it is. Disclaimer: I’m not a Vietnam expert, by any means–but it is fairly clear that Vietnam’s capitalism is only skin deep, covering an economy that is mostly state-controlled (oops, I hope I haven’t violated my own rule about not writing about economics), and a typically suppressive and repressive Communist police-state government. Hardly “New York with mopeds,” especially in the political sense.
For those interested in modern-day Vietnam, I recommend this article. Written in 2000, it’s probably somewhat outdated, but it seems to me to offer a fair picture of the country–although those among my readers who are Vietnam experts might be able to say whether that is correct or not.
Here’s an excerpt that expands upon the travelogue picture presented by the Times article:
Change is inevitable. The real question is, Will the change be evolutionary or revolutionary? Casual observers of Vietnam, impressed by the size and vitality of the “Honda at the cybercafe” crowd, speak of a coming generational change that will sweep aside today’s geriatric leadership. But this optimism is far too simplistic. True, the French-speaking veterans of the “senior” generation, esteemed for having fought the wars and unified the nation, are rapidly passing from the scene. But the next generation, 40 to 60 years of age, has begun to run the country and will not readily give up power and privilege. This “middle” generation, trained in Moscow and the capitals of the Soviet bloc, is committed to the VCP. The “junior” generation that grew up in the more open environment of the past decade will have to wait. Moreover, within this younger generation there will be competition, as the sons and daughters of current party members vie to inherit jobs and privileges.
And this, in particular, riveted me:
Another contradiction is that although the North won the battle, the South may yet win the war…Today a gradual “Southernization” of the North is becoming visible. The industrial parks on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City and the rice paddies of the Mekong delta now drive the national economy, producing two-thirds of the nation’s wealth and accounting for 80 percent of its tax revenue. Southern constituents urging privatization, entrepreneurial initiatives, and capitalist ideas are pressuring party politicians and the rigid ministerial bureaucracies of the North to change. The more robust economy of Ho Chi Minh City rewards its inhabitants with considerably higher wages than those earned in the nation’s capital. Thus in the struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the people, the former Saigon could win over Hanoi after all.
So, we may be able to replace that old chant with a new one: “Ho, ho ho Chi Minh City is gonna win.” Although it lacks the sparkling rhythm of the original, it makes up for it in ironic and tentative hopefulness. Will demographics, capitalism, and time allow the Vietnamese people to finally achieve a free and democratic society? I sincerely hope so. How many of the aging leftists who recited that long-ago chant would agree?
Sandals. Summer. Freedom. Foot-binding.
Foot-binding? you ask. What does that have to do with sandals, summer, freedom?
Well, I would have thought the answer to be: nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. Or, perhaps: opposite. But apparently, I would be wrong.
I am flabbergasted by this article in today’s NY Times about the lengths to which women apparently still go for fashion. Having been raised in the era of the obligatory girdle, for example, I know that fashion has always involved elements of pain, and probably always will. But–the sandal? To me, the sandal has always represented the opportunity to liberate the foot from winter restrictions, from chafing and binding and tightness.
But something has happened to the sandal. They’ve buried Birkenstocks, trumped Tevas, nixed Naots. They have found a way to make sandals remarkably painful, and at a remarkable price, too. Ah, progress!
Eva Gajzer, who sells shoes and clothing at Kirna Zabéte, a SoHo boutique, has witnessed the casualties. “Band-Aids, I see them all the time,” Ms. Gajzer said.
Suddenly women are pulling out shoes with straps “like little knives,” she said. “They walk into the store with their feet completely covered in blood.”
Ms. Gajzer faults the shoemaker, not the wearer. “When you’re paying between $300 and $600 for a pair of sandals, you expect them to be remotely comfortable,” she said. “Otherwise the designer should be smacked.”
I’m not so sure the designer of $600 sandals shouldn’t be smacked–just a teeny bit, anyway–even if the sandals are “remotely comfortable,” but that’s not the point. Straps, like little knives? That’s taking “cutting edge of fashion” to a whole other dimension.
Amtrak report:
Well, by the end of the trip, 80% of the toilets were dysfunctional. And the train was virtually full (methinks there is some sort of correlation between the two).
On the other hand, the seats were comfortable, my seatmate was silently plugged in the entire time (laptop, headset), the train was exactly and precisely on time (4 hours NY-Boston)–and we are alive, unlike at least 50 people in today’s horrific and tragic train wreck in Japan.
In light of my discussion yesterday of European safety standards vs. US ones, I wonder how Japan safety regulations factor in. Excessive speed seems to be the leading theory for the cause of today’s crash. A terrible, terrible thing.
An update for those awaiting Part 4C of the “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series: it’s in the process of being written.
But I always seem to underestimate the amount of work these things take (hmmm, I wonder what that’s all about). Previously, I said that it should be coming out early this week. That still might happen. But it’s more likely to be out mid-week, or even towards the end of the week. I will update further if that changes.
I’m going home today.
According to the Amtrak website, my train is sold out. That should be…interesting.
And, as luck would have it, this appears in today’s NY Times, entitled “Acela, built to be rail’s savior, bedevils Amtrak at every turn.”
Excerpts from the article:
Before the first train was built, the Federal Railroad Administration required it to meet crash safety standards that senior Amtrak officials considered too strict. That forced the manufacturers, Bombardier Inc. of Canada and GEC Alstom of France, to make the trains twice as heavy as European models. Workers dubbed the trains “le cochon” – the pig.
Some experts have speculated that the added weight contributed to a series of problems, including the latest one, with Acela’s wheels, brakes and shock-absorbing assemblies. Federal regulators are still investigating the cause of those problems….
The railroad agency has long required that passenger trains be heavier than European ones to withstand crashes.
Bombardier knew its new train would have to meet those requirements, a spokeswoman said. But Mr. Downs said he asked the rail agency to ease that standard for the new high-speed trains, to no avail.
“They decided they wanted to make this the safest train in the world,” he said. “All my engineers thought the rules were nuts.”
It’s interesting that some of the problems with the Acela seem to have come from the relative strictness of safety standards here in the US vis a vis Europe. I’ve noticed this trend before in other areas, such as the pharmaceutical industry. For example, those who recall the thalidomide babies may remember that there were relatively few born in this country as compared to Europe, because our regulations on the medication’s use in pregnancy were stricter.
I have no way of knowing who is right in the case of train safety–the US or Europe–and whether the regulations are too strict here, or are too lenient there. If I lack expertise in economics, I am a wizard in that field compared to my knowledge of train design. But I suspect that the sentence “All my engineers thought the rules were nuts” may be telling. Then again, maybe not.
In any case, it’s just another topic on which the US and Europe don’t see eye-to-eye.
Even though I was a good student, economics was my nemesis. I passed it, but it was a slow slogging grind, and it didn’t quite stick. And, although I’ve made an effort to learn more about economics since then, every time I try, my eyes seem to glaze over and I find myself nodding off over the book.
It’s not something I’m especially proud of, but at least it keeps me from writing a whole lot of claptrap on the topic.
However, lack of economic acumen doesn’t seem to stop many (probably many on both sides, to be fair) from spouting off on economic subjects. Blogger Dennis the Peasant isn’t too keen on these folks. He is a bona fide tax expert and CPA, as well as being a very funny guy–that’s funny ha-ha, not funny strange. (Oh, well, maybe just a little funny-strange, if you look at his photo–although, come to think of it, who am I to talk on that score?) Dennis takes to task those who write about economic matters while being economically uninformed.
I have a strong feeling that I have a great deal of company in my relative economic illiteracy. I’ve been struck by how many people know enough to get by–keep their bank accounts in order, do a little investing, pay their taxes–but don’t really understand the ramifications of specific proposals designed to affect the ecomony. And yet we need good information in order to make decisions on issues that matter: what to do about the deficit? What about tax cuts vs. tax hikes? Who–if anyone–is right in the battle of the dueling experts? Do they even know? After all, economics is not exactly a science on the order of chemistry or physics. How can the vast majority of us who aren’t tax attorneys or CPAs wade through the vast quantity of information– and misinformation, deliberate or otherwise–out there?
To a certain extent, of course, that’s true of any topic that has technical aspects–which is most topics. But I have a hunch that the subject of economics is a particular sticking point for many, whether they’ll admit it or not.
I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.
When you approach the promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York.
And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.
I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.
All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a prepoderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.
The garden is more advanced from what it must be at my house, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyachinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.
In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.
As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in 1965, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on every visit. So, what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth, restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.
I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.
The sight is intensely familiar to me–I used to see it almost every day when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.
[Previous posts in the series:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Interlude
Part 4A]
There were two widely-circulated and iconographic photographs taken during the Vietnam War. If you were around then, I can almost guarantee that you saw them, and that you remember them. They are so famous that you may have seen them and remember them even if you weren’t around at the time.
The first photo shows the February 1968 field execution of a Vietcong. Amazingly, the picture appears to have been taken at the very split-second the bullet is exiting his head. The prisoner is young-looking and slight, even boyish, dressed in a plaid shirt. He is facing the viewer and we see his face clearly and frontally, wincing, although the shooter is seen only in profile. The Vietcong’s hands are tied behind his back, and he seems terribly vulnerable. The entire photo conveys the idea of an innocent victim put to death by a ruthless and almost faceless executioner, as well as the brutality of war in general. There is no question that this photo, presented without much context, shocked people and engendered the belief that the South Vietnamese we were defending and dying for were no better than the Vietcong in their brutality.
The other photo came a few years later, towards the end of the war, in June of 1972. It is the photo of the little girl running down the road, shrieking, her clothes blown off with the force of the blast (or burned off? torn off? who knew?) her burns visible on her naked flesh. She is surrounded by other children, some of whom are shrieking, mouths open as in the Munch painting, conveying wordless horror. The children are without their parents; the only adults in the photo are several blurry and helmeted soldiers in the background (in some versions the photo was cropped to take out the soldiers on the right). The sky is dark with smoke. It’s a terrible evocation of the anguish that war inflicts on its most innocent of victims, children. A photo you couldn’t help looking at, and then you couldn’t help looking away from, and then you couldn’t help but remember it. By the time the photo was published, it was near the end of a war which had lost most of its support, but support eroded even further as a result of its wide dissemination.
The photos tugged at people at a deep emotional level, screaming, “War is bad. Stop it. Stop the madness.” Furthermore, they induced a deep feeling of guilt, making the onlooker somehow conspiratorial with the executioner and with those who had dropped the bombs—doubly conspiratorial, both as voyeur to unspeakable violence, and as a citizen of the country, the US, seemingly responsible for both acts.
It never occurred to me at the time that there might be more to learn about these photos than what I already knew. That there might be a whole other “story behind the story,” one the media wasn’t telling. After all, one picture is worth a thousand words—right? Pictures don’t lie—right? What more could there be to tell? What more could there be to know, and what difference could it ever make?
And yet, it turns out that there was more. Lots more. That “more,” when I finally learned it, didn’t change the fact that bad things happen in war—lots of them. But that “more” made a difference in the way that some viewers (including me) saw those photos, the South Vietnamese military, the US, and the press.
But I didn’t discover what that “more” was until about two years ago, around the time of the Iraq war. So I’m going to need to wait until I get to that point in my tale to tell the story behind the photos, and how learning the truth about them, after so many years, was one of many steps I took that swept me along the path of change, post-9/11.
[Next post in series here.]
(Part 1)
(Part 2)
(Part 3)
(Interlude)
PREFACE
Part 4 has been a long time coming. The article itself is long, too–so long that I finally decided it would be best to divide it into segments, so readers might have a chance of swallowing it without getting a massive case of indigestion.
I’ll tell you what this post isn’t–it’s not a history of the war itself. It isn’t about those who fought in it, or the Vietnamese people who suffered through it. It’s a political psychological history, an attempt to describe how perceptions were formed in those who remained in this country, particularly those who were young liberals, or who became liberals as a result. So, please don’t castigate me for ignoring this or that aspect of the war; this is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive.
This first segment, Part 4A, deals with my own personal history during the Vietnam era. I start with it to set the scene, and because I think in many ways it is typical of liberals of the time, and can serve as a springboard for later, more general, discussion. Part 4B, which will probably come out tomorrow, is relatively short, and deals with some Vietnam-era photographs. If you think Part 4A is self-indulgent, or rambling, or pointless–after all, who cares about my history?–please bear with me; there’s method to my madness. The payoff (I hope!) will occur in Part 4C.
Part 4C, the third and final segment of Part 4, will probably be posted at the beginning of next week. It’s the part in which I attempt to bring it all together in terms of intrapersonal political change, the theme of this entire “Mind is a difficult thing to change” series. In Part 4C, I will be coming to some more general observations about how the Vietnam War formed (and, in some cases, transformed) political perceptions for many people of my generation, particularly liberals. In later posts (as yet to be written, but definitely on my mind), I will attempt to connect all of this to post-9/11 political change.
So, that’s my blueprint and my plan.
THE VIETNAM WAR–THE HOME FRONT
For those of you accustomed to the almost lightening-quick “major operations” phase of the Gulf, Afghan, and Iraq wars, it’s hard to get a sense of how agonizingly interminable the Vietnam war seemed to those of us who grew up during it. And the Vietnam war was long, even by WWI and WWII standards, although smaller in scope.
The first Green Beret advisors arrived in Vietnam in 1961, when I was still in junior high. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution occurred in the summer of 1964, right before my senior year of high school, and the first US combat troops entered Vietnam shortly thereafter. In this manner, the war went from a distant background noise throughout my junior high and early high school years to a much more audible presence by my senior year of high school, and continued as a loud and discordant cacophony the entire time I was in college and for four years thereafter, with peace talks occurring in 1972, and the catastrophic US leavetaking in 1973. Saigon finally fell to the Communists in 1975. The toll in human life was high: the total number of US deaths there was over 58,000, with Vietnamese deaths in the war variously estimated as having been between one and two million.
The most serious escalation of the war coincided exactly with my college years, 1965-1969. I was younger than most of the other students; I had entered college shortly after my seventeenth birthday. We were all Cold War babies, having grown up with the constant threat of nuclear war but without the US actually having been involved in a major “hot” shooting war (except for the Korean conflict, which we were too young to really remember). So this was new to us.
I was very uneasy about the Vietnam war right from the start of the first troop commitments. At the beginning, the war upset me simply by the distressing fact that people were being killed; later on, I hated the war because it seemed unwinnable and thus an utter waste of human life.
Like most young people of the time, I took the war very personally. It’s probably hard to convey to later generations the powerful and all-pervasive nature of the draft, a sword of Damocles that hung over the heads of everyone. Even though I was a woman, and therefore couldn’t be drafted myself, every young man I knew was facing it, and so it affected me indirectly.
My boyfriend had flunked out of college (almost deliberately) in 1967, was drafted early in 1968, and six months later was sent to Vietnam and into heavy combat. Looking back, it seems to me that we were both painfully young. I was eighteen when we had begun to date, nineteen when he was drafted, twenty when he went to Vietnam, and barely twenty-one on his return. He was only one year older than I. I made sure I wrote to him every day while he was there. He was wounded and spent several weeks recuperating, but was sent back into the thick of the fighting. I was frantic with fear and pretty much alone with it; I didn’t personally know anyone else in college who had a loved one in a similar situation.
During the time he was there, and afterwards, I continued to hate the war (as did my boyfriend, by the way, although he felt it was his duty to serve). I hated the killing, was stricken by the nightly TV news featuring what seemed to be the same harrowing scenes played over and over: wailing Asian women clutching children, wounded soldiers on stretchers (I strained and squinted to see whether any of them looked like my boyfriend, because one of them might actually be my boyfriend), thick vegetation, burning huts. Over and over and over, to no seeming purpose, and with no end in sight. I could barely stand to watch, and sometimes I turned away, overwhelmed.
Throughout this time, both during the war and after, I was getting my news from several sources: network TV, Newsweek, Time, the Boston Globe, and the NY Times. I was under the impression that this represented a broad spectrum of news. These sources displayed a unanimity of opinion that I never questioned–after all, if so many highly respected media agreed, it must be because they were written by intelligent people who were seeking the truth, and telling it to us as best they could.
I remember Tet, Hue, Khe Sanh, all bunched together within a few short months in 1968, around the time my boyfriend was drafted. I remember those battles being portrayed as pointless scenes of carnage, signifying nothing. I remember the My Lai massacre, which also had occurred during the same time period, although we didn’t find out about it until a year later. It was deeply shocking to most of us; we had previously believed American soldiers incapable of such atrocities. We had been raised in the 50s on heroic WWII movies from the 40s, and had grown up with a press that had generally considered soldiers heroes, so this was a profoundly troubling revelation.
My attitude towards the war seemed to be quite typical, according to what I remember of my friends in college. We weren’t political junkies, for the most part, and hadn’t learned about the war in exhaustive detail. We read and/or watched the basic news and discussed the war, but in general terms–we felt we had the big picture correct, which was the most important thing, and we all agreed with each other, anyway. A few of my leftist friends (SDS was very active on my campus), spouted a more extreme version of events, in which they demonized the US–for example, I got into an argument with one friend who insisted that the goal of the US was to commit genocide in Vietnam–but the leftists seemed to me to be more interested in sloganeering and grandstanding than in actual facts or rational debate.
Of course, there were people who had different ideas about the war. But I personally knew none of these people, nor did I see their ideas being advocated in the media, for the most part. But there was the idea that the war originally had been both a good cause and a winnable one, although for political reasons the war had been mismanaged and fought in a half-hearted fashion. There was the idea that a liberal press had misrepresented the battles of 1968, including Tet, as defeats, when in fact they had been victories. There was the idea that, if we were to put more effort and money into it, the later policy of Vietnamization had a real chance of working and giving us the “peace with honor” we all desired, but the public had so turned against the war by that time that such money and effort would not be forthcoming.
But these voices seemed barely audible at the time. The only airing of some of these thoughts that I can recall was by John O’Neil during his June 1971 Dick Cavett show debate with John Kerry. O’Neill seemed sincere but naive and idealistic; Kerry had a world-weary air of having seen it all and known it all. But at least the debate provided food for thought and an airing of alternate views in a substantive manner, in a popular and readily-available forum. As such, it seemed unusual to me.
As time and the war had gone on, the tale told to us by the media wasn’t just about the war itself: it was about how the government had lied to the American people and deceived us, how it couldn’t be trusted. That message grew more focused during the early 70s, during the spring 1971 Congressional hearings on the war (the ones that featured John Kerry), and with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which came out two months later. It was particularly convincing to hear disillusioned veterans such as Kerry speak out and demonstrate against the war–after all, they were the ones who been there and seen it firsthand. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the government had been deceptive about the war and the planning behind it. Then there was the invasion of Cambodia, perceived as an escalation of the war after Nixon had promised a reduction; and the killing of student protesters at Kent State by the National Guard, which made us feel as though war had been declared on us, too–on young people, on students. The message that the government could not be trusted was further reinforced by the Watergate scandal, commencing with the break-in in 1972 and ending later, after we had left Vietnam, in the ignominious 1974 resignation of Nixon.
If we couldn’t trust the government–well, then, who could we trust? Many decided to trust the whistleblowers: the press, our new heroes. After all, they had published the Pentagon Papers. They had shown us photos of what had happened at Kent State. They had brought the horror of My Lai to our attention. They had been instrumental in the exposure of the Watergate scandal, which had disgraced (and later was to bring down) a President most of us already disliked anyway.
WAR’S END
By the early 70s, virtually everyone I knew had become convinced that the war had been a tragedy and that the lies were so endemic we had no way of learning the truth from the government. I attended the 1969 march on Washington and a few smaller rallies. I believed that what the US had tried to do–prevent the Communists from taking over the whole country–had been a worthwhile goal, but an impossible one.
It seemed that, in our efforts to prevent that takeover, we had caused great damage. I wasn’t even sure that the Vietnamese people had ever wanted us there in the first place, or that they supported the South Vietnamese government; there seemed to be so many North Vietnamese, and they just would not give up. What about that domino theory, anyway, the original justification for the war? It was just a theory, after all–was it even true, did it actually apply here? If the war kept going on this way, indefinitely, Vietnam itself would be destroyed (if it hadn’t already been), and more and more Americans would die, too, all in a losing cause.
Therefore I rejoiced as we pulled troops out, and was happy about the peace talks. I watched some of the footage of the fall of Saigon, and was heartsick, but I believed nothing could have prevented this–it had been inevitable, and better sooner than later, after more death and destruction. Finally, I turned away from those pictures, just as I’d turned away, at times, from footage of the war itself–too painful, too hopeless, too sad, too powerless to help.
These Vietnam memories and judgments remained encapsulated within me for the next thirty or so years, untouched and unexamined, a painful and unhealed wound. I saw no reason to re-examine them, and nothing to make me doubt them. They lay dormant but retained their potency, needing only the right conditions to germinate in surprising ways much later, post-9/11.
UPDATE: Part 4B has been posted.
The MSN headline did what it’s supposed to do–it certainly caught my eye: “Escapee elephants visit Seoul restaurant.” The article has a few wonderful details. There were six elephants in all; one elephant bolted during their daily parade outside a children’s park, and the others followed because, “they have a tendency to do that,” according to an official.
I had no idea elephants were such sheep.
One elephant “was briefly detained at a police station.” I hope they read him (her?) his (her?) Miranda rights.
I know elephants can be very dangerous, so it’s no joke when they escape, but all’s well that ends well, and this escapade did–although I’m not sure the elephants would agree. They are now back in captivity.
