Page 2 of 3 COMMENTARY Iraq: Yes, Rambo, you
get to win this time By Julian
Delasantellis
Vietnam War. The
revisionist-history project as applied to the
Vietnam experience was gathering full force. The
war was no longer a bloody, fatally mismanaged
fiasco - it was now a "noble cause".
More
important, the war was not lost by the troops -
they actually won the fight - but by other forces
in society: first, the
government, then other
societal forces.
The manhunt for the real
losers of the Vietnam War was on.
James
William Gibson, in his 1994 book Warrior
Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam
America, elaborated on how these beliefs
evolved.
Defeat in Vietnam came to be viewed
as the result of what the Joint Chiefs of Staff
called "self-imposed restraints". From this
perspective, technowar would have inevitably
produced victory if it hadn't been for the
influences of liberals in Congress, the anti-war
movement, and the news media, who together
stopped the military from unleashing its full
powers of destruction.
Gibson goes on
to document a diverse compilation of US
post-Vietnam cultural manifestations that
developed on the now-accepted belief that defeat
was caused by "self-imposed restraints".
Rambo: First Blood Part II and
other POW-rescue movies indulged the fantasy of
going back to Vietnam and blowing to pieces as
many Vietnamese as possible, preferably but not
necessarily limited to communists. Thereby they
were winning the war, and not having to be
concerned with the messy winning of the "hearts
and minds" that posed such a challenge in the
actual war.
Beyond that, there arose a
bewildering array of other cultural illustrations
of a US desire to change the actual historical
record and result of the Vietnam War, what Gibson
called the "New War". Among these were the rise of
suburban weekend warriors playing paintball, the
idolization of mercenaries, and an innumerable
parade of pulpy paperback novels and B-grade
movies that featured brave Vietnam veterans
brutally battling varied assortments of drug
dealers, treacherously spineless bureaucrats, and,
especially, the anti-war left.
Gibson
elaborates on the enemy in the New War that the
heroes are fighting:
They have to contend with a
different kind of enemy every step of the way -
"bleeding heart" liberals and complacent
government officials, moral cowards who refuse
to fight. Why do these leaders make themselves
the enemy of courageous good men?
In
the 1985 movie Year of the Dragon, Mickey
Rourke, playing Vietnam veteran turned New York
City police detective Stanley White, laments that,
just as it was in the war, he is unable to fight
Chinese drug gangs with the vigor he would like:
This is a [expletive] war, and I'm
not going to lose it, not this one. Not over
politics. It's always [expletive] politics. This
is Vietnam all over again. Nobody wants to win
this thing. Just flat-out win.
In
Chuck Norris' 1978 film Good Guys Wear
Black, any shade of gray between who is good
and who is bad is not allowed, as Norris learns
that the last surviving members of his Vietnam
commando unit are being killed off by a State
Department bureaucrat (from the Ivy League, no
less) who wants to open secret negotiations with
Hanoi.
And, of course, at the beginning of
Rambo: First Blood Part II, on being tasked
to return to Vietnam to rescue missing POWs,
Sylvester Stallone, who in reality spent the
Vietnam War safely ensconced in Switzerland
teaching physical education at a girls' private
school, asks the question that has in essence
become the pledge of allegiance of the new Vietnam
popular myth: "Do we get to win this time?"
Two movies act as perfect bookends to old
and new Vietnam consensus. In 1978's Coming
Home, Vietnam veteran and war supporter Bob
Hyde (Bruce Dern) is the misogynistic brute, while
paraplegic veteran and war opponent Luke Martin
(Jon Voight) is the sensitive, caring lover. (Of
course, part of Dern's justifiable rage, from the
point of view of pro-war forces, was that he had
been cuckolded by his wife, who else but the
eternally treacherous Jane Fonda.) Sixteen years
later, the roles were reversed as noble and gentle
Vietnam hero Forest Gump (Tom Hanks) stepped in to
protect his childhood sweetheart, Jenny (Robin
Wright), from an abusive anti-war protester,
played by Geoffrey Blake.
Inevitably,
Vietnam revisionism got sucked down into the
squalid vortex that is US political debate. The
political right found it one of the most effective
truncheons it had with which to beat the political
left. Many in the anti-war left matured into
activists and elective office holders of the
Democratic Party, and with the anti-war movement
now shouldered with culpability for the only war
that the United States ever lost, the left found
itself constantly on the defensive, especially in
gaining credibility in matters of foreign and
defense policy.
It was not as if there
were so many more war heroes on the Republican
right; if anything, just as many Vietnam veterans
entered US politics as Democrats as Republicans.
The major difference between the two sides'
Vietnam history was that most of those who later
became leaders of the political right spent their
Vietnam era contentedly hugging the protective
security blanket of the student deferments that
protected them from involuntary conscription. On
the other hand, many in the anti-war movement
burned from, and had their activism spurred by,
the guilt engendered by the phenomenon in which
their ability to get and stay in college protected
them from the horrors of Vietnam; those without
the means or ability to do likewise, mainly the
lower and lower-middle classes, had no such
readily available refuge. Those young men
subsequently found themselves drafted into
frontline combat in Vietnam.
Vietnam
revisionism is also very prevalent in the current
higher officer classes of the US military; most of
them were young junior officers in Vietnam, so the
theory's implicit absolving of that era's military
leadership from the incompetence and mismanagement
of the prosecution of that war is particularly
appealing.
In 2004, the Democratic Party
nominated John Kerry as its candidate for
president. Kerry was a genuine Vietnam War hero,
being awarded the Silver Star, a Bronze Star and
three Purple Hearts, but mostly he had gained fame
from an eloquent two-hour anti-war address he
delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in April 1971. During his 2004 campaign,
he tried to emphasize the former and ignore the
latter, but when the Republican-allied Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth reminded Americans of his
anti-war past (even to the extent of producing a
fake doctored photo of him together at a peace
rally with, yes, Jane Fonda), Kerry's campaign
faltered and ultimately failed, losing to
incumbent George W Bush by more than 3 million
votes. For the many anti-war veterans who
supported Kerry, the irony was excruciating - a
genuine war hero, Kerry, losing the election on
the issue of conduct during a war that the other
candidate, Bush, used every manner of artifice and
exercise of privilege to avoid.
If
anything, the "lessons" taken from September 11,
2001, had only reinforced Vietnam revisionism.
Even though there were absolutely no points of
ideological commonality, and more than 30 years of
history, between the actual enemies involved,
atheist Vietnamese communists and Islamic
fundamentalist Arabs, a consensus seemed to
develop that the attacks represented a total
discrediting of a central tenet of the Vietnam
anti-war movement, that peace was a possible, or
maybe even a desirable, national policy objective.
Even with no Big Brother ruthlessly
silencing the truth with repression and torture,
the US national consensus had sent the truth it no
longer wanted to accept about Vietnam down the
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