[Dialogue] Iraq Replaces Vietnam as Metaphor for Tragedy

Tue Feb 27 15:10:48 EST 2007

AlterNet

Iraq Replaces Vietnam as Metaphor for Tragedy

By Andrew Lam, New America Media
Posted on February 27, 2007, Printed on February 27, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/48368/

New America Media EDITOR'S NOTE: With the ghosts of Vietnam still haunting
the United States, the nation is doomed to repeat its misadventures abroad,
in Iraq and beyond, until a profound reckoning with its bellicose heart of
darkness occurs.

For almost three decades after U.S. helicopters flew over a smoke-filled
Saigon, Vietnam served as a vault of tragic metaphors for every American to
use. In movies, in literature, someone who went to 'Nam was someone who came
back a wreck, a traumatized soul who has seen or committed too many horrors
to ever return to normal life. In politics, Vietnam was a hard-learned
lesson that continued to influence U.S. foreign policies. It was an unhealed
wound, the cause of post-traumatic stress, the stuff bad dreams were made
of, hell in a small place.

Then came Iraq. Many comparisons have been made about the two wars. But what
Iraq may have finally done is not so much remind us of Vietnam as ultimately
usurp it from our national psyche.

Fighting the Vietnam War brought a multitude of symbols and icons to the
American mind. A new set is now being acquired in the current war. One can
almost imagine one era being replaced by another in the way that two kids
might trade cards: "I'll take My Lai for your Haditha"; "I'll take 'Hearts
and Minds' for 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'"; "Let's have Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho
Chi Minh for Muqtada al-Sadr and Osama Bin Ladin"; "I'll take Tiger Cage for
Abu Graib"; and "Let's have your Gulf of Tonkin for my WMD."

In another generation, when a future U.S. president sends troops to occupy
some intransigent country on a dubious objective, American pundits will most
likely ask this familiar question made new: "Will it be another Iraq?"

Yet, for a long time, Vietnam functioned as a benchmark for spectacular
American failure, and despite subsequent successful U.S. overseas ventures,
it remained a deep, searing wound. It took some time after the war's end
before movies were made and books sold on the topic. There was a willful
repression of America's only military defeat, followed by a flourish of
Vietnam novels and movies. Together they constructed a mythic reality around
the nation's experience in Vietnam that challenged our old notion of
manifest destiny and examined our loss of innocence.

In the 1980s, conservatives began to claim that the Vietnam Syndrome --
which they saw as an undesirable pacifism on the part of the American public
and the U.S. government -- has been "kicked." Most famous of them all was
George Bush Sr., who declared in 1991 after victory in the Persian Gulf War
that "the ghosts of Vietnam had been laid to rest beneath the sands of the
Arabian desert."

But Bush Sr. spoke too soon. The glory of winning did not translate into a
second presidential term, and Vietnam continued to haunt our national
psyche. When president Clinton withdrew troops from Somalia after 18
soldiers were killed in Mogadishu in 1993, diplomat Richard Holbrooke called
it the new "Vietmalia syndrome." Later, Clinton was reluctant to deploy
military force in Bosnia. Sen. John Kerry, a Vietnam vet, lost his bid for
the presidential election in 2004 because of his ambiguous relationship with
Vietnam: During the campaign he billed himself as a war hero despite his
stint as an anti-war protestor after the war. Sen. John McCain, who was
tortured in Hanoi as a POW during the war, caused an uproar when he used the
term "gook" to describe his Vietnamese captives during his 2000 presidential
campaign bid. Nor does it seem to help his presidential efforts this time
around when the senator, who felt Vietnam could have been won had it not
been hampered by politics, is supporting the military surge in Iraq while
most Americans desire troop withdrawal.

What we are learning now with the enormous failure of Iraq -- the lies and
deception from the White House, the images of Iraqis wailing beside their
dead loved ones, the shattered homes, bloody sidewalks, tortured prisoners,
body parts in market stalls, burnt-out cars, roadside bombs, downed
helicopters and horribly maimed American soldiers -- is that tragedy cannot
simply be overcome with some supposed military victory, but with another
tragedy of equal if not greater proportion.

Indeed, the war in Iraq is showing us that the so-called Vietnam Syndrome
cannot be "kicked," as it were, by winning but by losing, as it forces us to
face our collective grief and guilt anew. For all the horrors committed in
the name of democracy, and all the soul-searching Americans did after the
Vietnam War -- remember that '70s mantra, "No More Vietnams!" many screamed
from the top of their lungs? -- we failed to alter the bellicose nature of
our nation.

Years ago, the poet Robert Bly argued that Americans have yet to experience
ablution over past atrocities. "We're engaged in a vast forgetting mechanism
and from the point of view of psychology, we're refusing to eat our grief,
refusing to really to eat our dark side," Bly told Bill Moyers on national
public television. "And therefore what Jung says is really terrifying -- if
you do not absorb the things you have done in your life ... then you will
have to repeat them."

In this sense, individual karma is not so different from that of a nation.
For it's many a country's fate, too, to keep on repeating acts of barbarism
until, hopefully, it comes to some profound reckoning with its own heart of
darkness. 

Andrew Lam is a NAM editor and author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the
Vietnamese Diaspora" (Heyday Books, 2005), which recently won a PEN/Beyond
Margins award. 

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