Why the Vietnam War remains a wound that will not heal

Share

For the past several years Americans have been marking several important 150th anniversaries: the beginning of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The racial tensions in Ferguson, Mo., demonstrate the truth of William Faulkner's insight often applied to the American South: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

That maxim has never rung truer than it does with respect to another series of retrospectives beginning in the United States: the 50th anniversary commemorations of several landmarks of the Vietnam War. The war has been over since 1975, but Americans – and some Canadians, including some who settled north of the border during the Vietnam years – have been engaged in conflict over it for decades. That past is not yet dead. It is not even past.

Tensions over the Vietnam War flared again this month with a controversy about a web timeline prepared by the Pentagon that, according to the U.S. Defence Department, is intended to "provide the American public with historically accurate materials" about the war.

Easier said than done. The Pentagon timeline already has prompted a firefight about the legacy of a war that involved more tragedy than triumphs, several mistakes and fatal miscalculations, and battles over geographical locales real (Khe Sahn, Hue, among many others) and metaphorical (the Credibility Gap ascribed to President Lyndon B. Johnson).

"This controversy is new in the sense that it centres on an official effort to commemorate a war that the U.S. government has previously tried to forget," says Edward G. Miller, a Dartmouth College expert on the Vietnam War. "But both the Pentagon website and the criticisms of it are part of the larger debates that have been going on for decades."

Those debates have flared from time to time – when a Baby Boom-era presidential candidate, such as Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, had to explain why he did not serve in Vietnam, for example, or when a Vietnam veteran, such as Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel or Secretary of State John Kerry, both former senators, was nominated for high office.

They flare, too, in classrooms around the country, where the war is still not a settled matter, and even in political debate, where many liberals speak with the easy assumption that the war was a grave error and many conservatives speak with the equally easy assumption that the grave error of the war was not committing the country to winning it.

And the wisdom of the war has remained a hardy perennial question in Canada, still home to tens of thousands of aging war resisters who sought sanctuary north of the border, found comfort for their cause in Canada and, in many cases, sculpted comfortable lives in the country, where many of them married and reared families.

The U.S. has already passed the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which prompted congressional action that gave Presidents Johnson and Richard Nixon authority to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia. Both the incident and the resolution remain matters of fiery controversy in the country. Early next year the nation will mark half-century anniversaries of President Johnson's bombing offensive against North Vietnam, and the phrase "Rolling Thunder," the mission name for the bombing, will echo across the United States once again. For many, it will be like the recurrence of a bad dream.

Perhaps the most significant remembrance undertaking is Ken Burns's effort to produce a lengthy television series about the war. Mr. Burns has produced evocative retrospectives on the Civil War, the history of baseball and, most recently, the Roosevelt family.

This Vietnam documentary has been years in the making and involves distinguished scholars such as Dartmouth's Prof. Miller and Thomas Vallely, who for many years headed Harvard's centre for the study of Vietnam and who characterizes the film project as "a very serious attempt to make sense of the war."

The resilience of Vietnam in the American memory is remarkable. It is almost always described as the first war the United States lost, and the word "Vietnam" more often is applied to the conflict than to the country.

The United States and Vietnam have had formal diplomatic relations for almost two decades; the irony is that these relations were implemented by Mr. Clinton, who avoided service in the war and spent much of his 1992 presidential campaign explaining his draft status during his Rhodes Scholar years at Oxford. There have been trade and anti-drug agreements between the two countries since, and commerce between the two countries has developed greatly.

Even so, Vietnam remains a wound on the body politic of the United States that will not heal.

"There is no consensus among Americans about how to remember the Vietnam War," says Prof. Miller, author of a landmark 2013 book about Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese leader overthrown and killed in a 1963 coup. "The success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington has turned precisely on its remarkable capacity to accommodate diverse and conflicting memories of the war."

But the very diversity of those views means that the approaching Vietnam commemorations will be contentious and difficult. Vietnam may be in the past, but it is not past triggering conflicting and bitter feelings among Americans, even a half century later.