Thinking Vietnam

                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                                                              

To slightly paraphrase William Faulkner, "The past isn't dead. It's not even past yet.”

The Vietnam war is not past.  It's part of the life-story of every American of my generation.  But it's also part of America's story, and is not past for anyone who is part of America's story.  Somebody once said that "things are the way they are now because they got that way."  Vietnam is part of how America got the way it is now, and part of how America will be in all the future.

Ken Burns' Vietnam documentary on P.B.S. last Fall did a masterful job of presenting the many kinds of people and stories that were part of the war.  But he left it for us to think about what the war meant, and continues to mean: the past isn't dead, or even past yet.  It continues having meaning for us, and historical perspective gives it new meaning.

But like everything in life, we get the past wrong when we're not honest about it: especially, honest about our part in it.  There was recently a striking example of getting it right and getting it wrong, when a couple well-known newspaper columnists both happened to write about Americans' lack of faith in government.  Both looked at our history to explain how things got that way.

Leonard Pitts highlighted Vietnam as the event that caused many Americans to begin doubting what our government told us, and what our government did.  The events of Watergate, taking place as the war was winding down, convinced many more that our government could not be trusted.  (And Pitts didn't say...but I will...that Ronald Reagan's Inaugural proclamation that "Government is the PROBLEM" both captured and gave Presidential imprimatur to Americans' lack of faith in government following Vietnam and Watergate.)

But Vietnam (and Watergate) was prominent by its absence from the musings of hard-line conservative George Will.  Will argued instead that Americans lost faith in their government because New Deal "Liberalism" failed.

Since he was of military-service age himself during the Vietnam war, it's impossible to believe Will was unaware of how Vietnam effected people at the time, especially those who served in the war, and those who protested it.  (Will himself did neither).  But Will serves as an exemplar of how we get the past, and the present, wrong.  Reading our preconceived meaning into the past, as Will does his conservative ideology, falsifies history...and current reality.

Will is not alone in getting Vietnam wrong.  Anyone who believes America "won" in Vietnam gets it wrong.  If America's purpose was to keep South Vietnam from falling under communist rule, we failed.  If North Vietnam's purpose was to re-unite their country under communist rule, they succeeded.  Arguing otherwise is delusional.

But there probably aren't many who'd argue America "won" in Vietnam.  The question for most Americans is why we lost the war.  And like the war itself, that retrospective question of meaning requires honesty.

I had to admire Robert McNamara.  Secretary of Defense during the first part of the war, he was later able to look at the reasoning by which he and the others who directed the war got into it, and stayed in it.  Even in retrospect it's rare that anyone, especially those who've been leaders during disastrous events, admit they were wrong: but McNamara had that courage.

McNamara said (in his 1995 memoirs, in the movie "The Fog of War," and in numerous interviews) that America's planners and leaders chose to enter the war, and made bad decisions in its conduct, because they believed "the domino theory."  America's leaders were convinced that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, Communism would infect the bordering countries, and then the countries bordering them. Their theory was that the nations of the world would thus fall to Communism sequentially, like dominos, until America was surrounded and engulfed by world-wide Communism.  McNamara had the integrity and courage to look back and say, "we were wrong."

America's first leaders in the war gave the war false meaning, with disastrous consequences.  And there are still false "meanings" being read into the war, retrospectively; such as Will's ideological view that it had nothing to do with Americans' losing faith in their government.

But the false retrospective "meaning" of Vietnam I hear most often is that "the media," and anti-war protestors, turned Americans against the war, and made America and its soldiers lose the will to win...causing America to lose the war.

It was originally Richard Nixon's "meaning," after he took over the war's conduct.  Like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon feared being "the first President to lose a war."  Johnson's solution had been to escalate the war, in the belief that defeat could be staved off that way.  Nixon tried escalation too: but as it became increasingly clear victory was not possible, Nixon found it politically expedient to deflect failure onto someone else.  Not surprisingly, he blamed those he considered his "enemies," the media and anti-war protestors.

It was a self-serving political ploy, then and now.  Nixon lied self-servingly in his ascription of defeat, which can surprise no one.  And with everything else we know of Nixon's character, it's hard to understand why any honest person would continue to believe the "meaning" he gave the war. 

The media simply did their job.  They told us and showed us what was happening: on battlefields, and, as the Pentagon Papers came out, in American government councils.  People saw that what was happening was horrible...knowingly purposeless destruction and death, and criminal political manipulation of our people and government.   People rightly demanded an end to the horror, for the good of our people and country.

Complaints that "the media" lost the war by not falsifying it as glorious and good was Nixon's ploy to disguise political self-interest as "patriotism."  No one, those directing the war most of all, believed we were winning, or could win, the war.  No one believed that it was in the best interests of America and its soldiers to spend more of their blood in Vietnam.  Politicians who pretended to believe they could lead America to victory in Vietnam, but were being undermined by the media and anti-war protestors, "played" the war in the most evil way possible, for their own cynical political advantage.

But Nixon's lying "meaning" of Vietnam is still fixed in some people's minds.  I still hear it from them.  As a political ploy, it has worked well.  The people who still believe that lie are largely the same self-deluded people who were once Nixon's, and are now Trump's, "base:" as if lying to ourselves about Vietnam's meaning will "make America great again."

More disturbing is that Americans' giving a false "meaning" to defeat in Vietnam has a historical parallel in Weimar Germany.  Like America, Germany lost a war.  As in post-Vietnam America, many in post-war Germany questioned how it could have happened, for the spirit of nationalist pride (American or German) is always that our soldiers, our courage, our will, and our purpose are so superior to any other nation's that we can never be defeated.

Many Germans would not give up their nationalistic pride; but could not reconcile it with Germany's undeniable defeat.  They chose to believe the comfortable lie their politicians told them, that Germany lost the war because the nation and its soldiers were"stabbed in the back" by the machinations of enemies at home.  (And Hitler wasn't alone in telling them the Jews were that enemy.)  Many Germans chose to believe that lie, and believed that Nazism would restore Germany to greatness.

It has yet to be seen what will be the outcome of Americans believing the "stabbed-in-the-back" lie about Vietnam, that "the media" and ("liberal") anti-war protestors lost the war.  But we already see that hatred of Nixon's scapegoats is an article-of-faith for supporters of the current president; and that his deceived "base" believes his immoral and corrupt rule is the only thing that will "make America great again."

Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin spoke wisdom about war: "you don't win a war any more than you win an earthquake."  Satan is the spiritual author of all man's wars; and only satan ever wins them, gaining his purpose of destroying people physically, psychologically, and spiritually.  And on the rubble of war he builds toward further destruction: confirming the "winners" in their self-pride (satan's own sin, which is under God's heaviest judgement), and fomenting murderous self-delusion on the thwarted national pride of the defeated.

But satan never gets the final say.  God holds out repentance, for people and for the nations they are.  If we can be honest enough to admit to ourselves that we lost in Vietnam, we can be as honest with ourselves as Robert McNamara was, and admit that "we were wrong."  The only way people or nations begin to free themselves from the consequences of their wrong-doing is admitting it to God and to themselves.

We were wrong in our pride.  Wrong that scripture's judgement on pride somehow didn't (and doesn't) apply to America the same as to any other person or people that ever existed; and wrong to disbelieve God that pride goes before a fall.  Wrong to believe the politicians who told us that we can restore America's pride by blaming other people for our fall.

Continuingly wrong to want America to be proud, and wrong to believe those who tell us that restoring pride will bring God's blessing on America...and not God's judgement on America.

Nations are people, and people make mistakes.  We were mistaken in what we thought we were doing in Vietnam.  God is merciful to those who admit doing wrong, and stop doing wrong.  If we instead tell ourselves lies about Vietnam, in order to maintain our pride, we delude ourselves about the war's meaning, and about current reality.  Most significantly, we continue doing wrong.

God promises no blessing to the self-deluded, and willful wrong-doers.