BOOK REVIEW : Viewing Vietnam in Metaphorical Terms : THE LEGACY The Vietnam War in the American Imagination<i> Edited by D. Michael Shafer</i> Beacon Press $24.95, 340 pages

Vietnam is like being in a plane without a parachute when all the engines go out. If you jump, you’ll probably be killed, and if you stay in, you’ll crash. That’s what it is.

The speaker is, remarkably enough, Lyndon Johnson. The words were uttered in confidence to his inner circle of advisers in July, 1965, less than one year after Johnson was elected to the presidency as a “peace candidate.” Within a few days, Johnson would send 100,000 American troops to fight in Vietnam. America’s ordeal was just beginning in earnest.

That moment is evoked by Lloyd Gardner in “The Legacy,” a collection of essays that ponder the war in Vietnam both as an historical experience and, more provocatively, as a metaphor for the crisis of confidence that has afflicted America in the late 20th Century.

“The Legacy” is a kind of intellectual iconography, a study of how Vietnam has been perceived and portrayed in the American mass media, the arts, the popular culture and the conventional wisdom of politics and diplomacy. But it is also a form of collective psychoanalysis, a probing examination of the peculiar American neurosis called Vietnam.

“Vietnam has become . . . a powerful symbol of an America out of balance,” writes editor and essayist D. Michael Shafer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, in his preface. “We see the war both as a powerful magnifying glass, enlarging critical themes in American life, and as a burning glass, searing our consciousness and leaving scars that are now themselves part of who and what we are.”

“The Legacy” is, among many other things, a persistent effort to capture the experience of Vietnam in metaphorical terms. Johnson’s cynical and despairing simile is only one example.

Benjamin Barber characterizes the war as “America’s collective Dreyfus case.” Michael X. Delli Carpini calls it “a potent political symbol, a montage of discrete, contradictory, and arresting images seared into our individual and collective psyches.” Lloyd Gardner sums it up as “a searing flame that cuts through . . . myths.” (“Searing,” you will notice, appears to be the adjective of choice among contributors to “The Legacy.”)

The book is also a useful and illuminating study of the repercussions of Vietnam in the real world. Barbara Tischler, for example, points out that the Vietnam Era--which, of course, was also the era of Camelot and the New Frontier, the Peace Corps and the Freedom Riders, the Beatles and the Summer of Love--started in a spirit of boundless optimism and ended in abject despair.

“It was during the ‘60s,” she points out, “that the concept of cultural, political, and artistic protest reached a wide public and bequeathed a legacy of questioning and struggle.”

Thus, for example, Peter B. Levy contemplates the upheavals within the black community during the Vietnam era, and Ruth Rosen does the same for the women’s movement: “In many ways,” she argues, “the women’s peace movement is one of the most profound legacies of the Vietnam war.”

James W. Tollefson reminds us that the nearly 1 million refugees from Southeast Asia are a very palpable heritage of the Vietnam War: “The official version of history--that communists create refugees while Americans save them--disguises the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the ongoing refugee crisis.”

Virtually all of the contributors seem to agree that Vietnam is, above all, a metaphor for pain and passion in the American soul.

Yet only a few of the essayists manage to evoke much passion of their own.

Shafer is perhaps the liveliest of them all, and he manages to bring some rhetorical fire to his ambitious work. The legacy of Vietnam, according to Shafer, is “a legacy of pain. . . . It is a legacy of unfulfilled promises and lingering, unmet needs. It is a legacy of disillusionment, of veterans not proud of their service to their country, but embittered by it.”

And the importance of understanding the sometimes ugly and heartbreaking legacy of Vietnam is underscored by essayist James Tollefson: “More is at stake than memory,” he reminds us, “for memory becomes history, and history is one source for current policy decisions.”

In that sense, each contributor to “The Legacy” insists that we understand with precision and clarity what it means when we vow that America’s future will not include “another Vietnam.”

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Lives of the Dead” by Charlie Smith (Linden Press).