Shadows and Mirrors

WASHINGTON —  In Vietnam, everything we saw was a mirror image, a reflected reality, not quite what we thought it to be. Even the symbolic last helicopter off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon--the engraved image of a great and foolish nation humbled--was the next-to-last helicopter.

After the “last” left at dawn, 25 years ago this April 30, a rear guard of 11 uneasy Marines stayed behind, barricaded atop the building. From below, they were engulfed by the wails of those who knew with certainty they were being left behind. At a hastily blockaded door, the final rooftop barrier against the masses we had come to save so many years earlier, a desperate arm smashed through a window, fingers outstretched toward old friends, drinking buddies, chums. A Marine took the arm, wrenched it in a circle against the shards of broken glass. What was a superpower to do? The arm jerked back. The Marines posted one of their small band at the door to wrench each persistent new arm.

An hour passed, and the nervous troopers began making contingency plans for their own possible abandonment. Such was this war.

Then the last whump-whump-whumps emerged out of the morning sun. A giant Chinook, surrounded by a half-dozen black Cobra gunships, approached in the usual low treetop pattern. The Marines, according to David Butler, writing in “The Fall of Saigon,” dumped all their remaining tear-gas grenades over the side of the building. One last bit of suppressing fire. Friendly fire against the forsaken. The great rotors of the Chinook, the largest helicopter we owned, sucked the tear gas up into the hull and cockpit, blinding crew and occupant alike as they took off. We went out as unseeing as we had come in.

So now, 25 years have passed. In one of the great ironies, Vietnam seems to have emerged more psychically secure than we have. They are building battlefield parks and tourist attractions and AK-47 shooting galleries to allow Americans, nation of tourists that we are, to relive what we did to them. Fire a round, Yank, and leave a dollar behind this time.

We, on the other hand, have spent our time in a perverse national passion for endless and disputatious post-mortems that have left us seeing our way no more clearly today than we did on April 30, 1975, or the day the American “advisors” entered in force in 1961 or the Marines landed in Da Nang in 1965. We have not achieved consensus on why we were there, whether we should have been there, whether we could or should have won, not even what “win” means. We surely have not concluded that, in a world so changed, we should just let it go away now. I even heard a young man complain recently that his generation didn’t have a Vietnam against which to test its mettle, its manhood. His life would be incomplete. Good God.

So we talk endlessly and circuitously about it, until the words all merge into a staccato of bad rap. There isn’t an Ivy League college or wannabe, a think tank on the right or left, that hasn’t had a recent Vietnam roundtable--and more than one in each of the past 25 years. They are busy rotating the old warriors before they die out and grooming self-certain young academics for the great circle ahead.

One elderly civil servant, now in his 80s, all public memory of a life’s service gone except for his role in the war, confided recently that he can still earn a living in Washington just attending these seminars. “Breakfast, lunch and dinner,” he cackled about the endless opportunities to reminisce. With honorariums at some, meals at all, “It sure beats Medicare.”

Even former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who swore himself to 30 years of a monk’s silence for the crosses he rightly bears, has broken his vow. McNamara the quantifier. The numbers man from the Ford Motor Co. At congressional hearings in the 1960s, he had an aide sitting at his side with a giant briefcase so stuffed with numbers that the “elbow man,” as the aide was called, could come up with any figure a congressman requested. Defense Department analysts had a joke about him: McNamara could depend on him, if need be, to come up with the length of the linear foreskin of all the Viet Cong south of the Mekong.

McNamara once sent all his numbers people for a long weekend retreat to produce a “Dow Jones average” of Vietnam indicators that would tell him if his overall market was going up or down. They tried, for one day--and then they drank.

Two plus two is four, and we will win the war. That was McNamara’s bottom line. The problem, a CIA official once said, was that McNamara could never get a handle on what “two” represented.

Now he is out there as well, adding to the postwar babble. A couple of books, visits to Hanoi, press conferences. If someone would just explain what the old man is trying to tell us. (Memory: How we laughed, so sure of ourselves, at the decadent old French generals as they rationalized their defeat in the same jungles.)

The young revisionists have rediscovered the Cold War and the rightness of our escapade in Southeast Asia, using all the reasons the old gang did, in new books with titles like “Vietnam: The Necessary War” and “A Better War.” The Russians and Chinese were ruthless antagonists who had to be stopped before we were forced to stop them at the beaches of San Diego.

The old Soviets and Chinese were indeed ruthless antagonists of the United States, the Cold War very real. We certainly did teach our ruthless adversaries some lessons in Vietnam. The Soviets were so impressed by our strategy that they marched into their own bog in Afghanistan and, eventually, into oblivion. As for the Chinese, once we finally got out, they invaded Vietnam. But they cut their losses and left somewhere between 10 and 20 years faster than we did. (Agreeing on when we got into Vietnam was as difficult as defining “two.”) Now, U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles are pointed at the Chinese rather than at the Russians. History has its shadows and mirrors, too.

The 25th anniversary arrives during the first U.S. presidential election of a new millennium and, naturally, the old war showed up briefly in the campaign all these years later. We could have won it, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pumped away. The win-lose argument is so tiring now. But it won’t go away, either.

Win. Sure, with one degree or another of increasingly brutal technological power. But what would we win and, more important, what would we do with it? Only two real options come to mind: Turn our newly won turf over to “our boys” in the south--unable to hold on to a victorious battlefield, let alone a country, in all the years we were there. Or occupy it.

So we come full circle, back to the beginning and a land where nothing was quite what it seemed. We had talked disparagingly of a tiny, tinhorn country halfway around the world. Now, rather than babble on for another 25 years, we might be better served absorbing some basics we ignored while we were there. Vietnam may or may not have had strategic importance in the context of the Cold War. But not only did we never understand its history, its culture, its politics or goals, we still have not come to terms with the reality that it was not a tiny, tinhorn country, ours for the gobbling.

Vietnam has more than twice the population of California and two-thirds the land area. Old South Vietnam, which we set out to defend, had a coastline longer, and far more porous, than California’s. The coastline of today’s united country is longer than the stretch from the Canadian border to Mexico. It is a country with mountains smaller but as dense as the Sierra, with jungle and forests far more impenetrable, with urban neighborhoods as murky and concealing as any in Los Angeles. We still talk of winning? We, as victors and occupiers, would blockade and patrol that coastline, police that turf?

Maybe 25 years later is not the time to forget or go on with fruitless seminars about what we thought Vietnam was, but, finally, to try to understand what we made it: a mirage, a swamp for fools, a house of mirrors that is gone, thankfully, with the darkly necessary double-think of the Cold War.

Even McCain, whose suffering was unparalleled in Vietnam, had a sense of humor about his campaign rhetoric.

He offset his win-the-war lines with a story about Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, his fellow Arizonan Republican and Vietnam ultrahawk who said to hell with the Soviet saber rattling and the Chinese threats to enter the war when he ran for president in 1964: Go in and win. Goldwater served as McCain’s 1986 Senate campaign manager. “On election eve, he got a little nostalgic,” McCain recalled, “and he said, ‘You know, John, if I had been elected in 1964 and beaten Lyndon Johnson, you would have never spent all those years in a Vietnamese prison camp.’ I said, ‘You’re right, Barry, it would have been a Chinese prison camp.’ ”

Copyright 00, William Prochnau

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

This story makes reference to the image of a helicopter taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. The helicopter in the well-known photo, which published with this story, was actually taking off from another building in Saigon, described in the original caption as an apartment building.

--- END NOTE ---