The Vietnam War and the Resurrection of the Dead

 by Nathan Alexander  

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The Vietnam war will not be over until less attention is given to resurrecting the ghosts of the past, and more to those who solider on and carry the very real burdens of America’s South East Asian war.

Since the early eighties, the image of the Vietnam veteran has been associated with combat and mental instability. Coppola’s Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) in Apocalypse Now, Michael Vronsky (Robert de Niro) in The Deer Hunter, and the men of Oliver Stone’s Platoon are part of a robust tradition of deranged, semi-mythical heroes that extend back to Daniel Boone, the frontier men, and even the Indian warrior of colonial America. They are loners, hunters who live on the boundaries of American society. Little is known about them, and yet they are also its heroes — possessors of hard won wisdom and supernatural strength. Hence, a paradox of the American cultural hero: his literary and cinematic marginalization from society makes him central to American culture.

Rehabilitating the image of the Vietnam veteran in the American imagination (a weak, impotent “country club” type in Jane Fonda’s 1976 Coming Home), consisted, unsurprisingly, in reassociating his image with the marginal. Stallone’s 1982 First Blood did this with a vengeance. John Rambo is a trained killer, a man of few words, who emerges from the forests to wreak havoc — a Just havoc — on an impure society that rejects him. But in doing so, John Rambo leaves the jungles of Vietnam and takes on the trappings of American history.  When Ronald Reagan in the same year declared that, “Ours was a just cause,” Vietnam left the realm of factual debate and metamorphosized into political and cultural myth. A lost war is only a failure if it can’t be re-imagined, and Reagan’s speech shifted the understanding of the war from its military outcome to its elusive intent. With his speech, he opened the door for American culture to absorb the war. 

The Vietnam veteran in the early eighties was restored to the American imagination around three motifs: KIA, MIA and POW.  With the completion of the Vietnam war memorial in November of 1982, those killed in action became the most well known symbol of the war. And yet the monument’s location below the surface of the ground makes it almost invisible, until you draw near it by walking down the pathway in front of it.

After the return of American prisoners of war following the Paris treaty of 1973, the very existence of POWs became a point of contention. In the popular imagination, POWs and MIAs were often confused. As was the case in the movie Uncommon Valor, both were in need of being rescued. All three groups were associated with violence and unresolved conflict. More importantly, those labeled could not speak: the dead and missing make no sound. The rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran was thus most peculiar: it was to be generated in the silent space of the fallen and missing. And yet this presented a problem: who would supply their voice? 

Accompanying the letters KIA, MIA, POW, was an image of the Vietnam experience as one of deliberate and unrelenting violence. The most banal actions in Mark Baker’s Nam or Ron Glasser’s 365 Days, cleaning floors or taking a nap for example, are transformed into ciphers of horror.  And yet in this way, the war’s opponents and its supporters could unite in the belief that Vietnam was a moment of grisly apocalypse. Whatever one said about the war, one’s opinion had to be unequivocal: to compromise in the face of monstrosity could only be to excuse evil. The dead would carry a heavy burden.

While the controversies of the Vietnam war have diminished over the years, this is in part because this most recent, sanguine incarnation of the Vietnam veteran satisfies the general public in a way previous images failed. The veteran’s awesome fighting capacity appeals to American masculinity, and his derangement and willingness to kill innocents placates the political left. John Kerry’s self presentation as a combat veteran who was at least aware of atrocities, accommodates the image of the modern Vietnam warrior. He is a soldier on the edge.  

And yet both stereotypes of the Vietnam veteran are inaccurate. More insidious, as an American cultural creation, the recent success of the Vietnam-vet-as-fighting-machine image, is possible only by an amnesia towards the actual war. The recent resurrection of the image of Vietnam veteran is done at the expense of the historical veteran and Vietnam.

In his controversial book Stolen Valor, B.G. Burkett writes that “the image that most people have of the war — that most of those troops were slogging through the jungle, shooting at the enemy twenty-four hours a day for their entire tour — was far from reality.” In fact, Burkett writes, “the structure of the US military in Vietnam was like a giant pyramid, with 80 percent of the troops at the bottom providing various services so that the other 20 percent could fight. Most servicemen were like me, performing support work at a rear base.”  While it was true that “there were Green Berets out eating snakes in the highlands [and]. . .Infantry soldiers . . . on search and destroy missions in free-fire zones. . . . .most of us lived in self contained communities where we ate, watched movies, went on R&R.”  

Burkett’s point is not to diminish the image of the Vietnam veteran. Instead he argues that it was noble for a serviceman to have served in Vietnam despite not being able to provide the media with tales of combat trauma or anger inspired “atrocities.”

Stolen Valor is about much more than the caricature of the Vietnam veteran. The bulk of Stolen Valor’s 600 pages chronicle how this image of the Vietnam combat veteran has been not only created by American culture and exploited for its own, often financial, end; but has been foisted mercilessly upon the veterans themselves. Burkett gives accounts of veterans who feel compelled to exaggerate their own experiences, because they are unable live up to the bloodthirsty Rambo image enthusiastically embraced by popular culture. Other veterans Burkett writes about expound upon atrocities never committed. The strange case of Steven Pitkin, is a case in point. Pitkin originally testified in the Winter Soldier Investigation about poor soldier training and low morale among the troops in the 9th division in 1968. As a recent anti-Kerry rally (September 12, 2004), he has “reversed” himself and apologized to vets for confessing to accounts of war crimes he never committed. To some veterans it is more difficult to “live up to” American expectations of what a veteran should be, than surviving the actual war itself.  

Another example of how the American cultural image of the veteran has replaced the veterans themselves, may be found in the scant attention the media pays towards living victims of the war.  Sons and Daughters in Touch is a group whose goal is, as their mission statement puts it, “To locate, unite and provide support to Sons, Daughters and other family members of those who died or remain missing as a result of the Vietnam War."  These families of the vets who died in Vietnam have little to do with the “struggle against communism” or the “committing of atrocities” which remain the media’s focus. Rather than focusing on the dead and the unresolved politics of the war, SDIT attempts to bring those who survived it into the spotlight. While it is common knowledge that over 55 thousand servicemen died in Vietnam, few know that over 20,000 children grew up not knowing why “their fathers weren’t coming home.”  

The purpose of SDIT is to bring these “Children of the Warriors” together and to refocus attention away from the dead and the speculations that surround them. They are attempting to turn attention towards the war’s “living legacy.” Board of Director leader Tony Cordero writes that one of SDIT’s functions is to permit its members to find other “orphans.” In this way “they [are able to discover that they] were not the only ones to grow up thinking only they were enduring such a loss.” The League of Families is a similar organization, whose members have loved ones who are still missing. They meet once a year, after their children go the Wall, for Father’s Day. SDIT and the League of Families are active locally. Michelle Lynn Mitchell, one of the founding members of SDIT, is active in local schools in Florida, giving information about the personal and still very present legacy of the war. Mitchell’s father, Mike Mitchell, was killed in Vietnam in 1969 (1st BN, 6th Inf., Americal Div.) and it took her over 20 years to begin finding out about her father, his friends, and his thoughts about her.

The real marginalization of people and groups such as Michelle, SDIT and The League of Families comes from their inability to be assimilated by the myths of the war increasingly entrenched in American culture. The children of the war’s dead are categorized, Mitchell declares, “most cruelly as orphans.” This is unsurprising: American culture’s fixation on the dead and the absent, on KIAs, MIAs and POWs makes its living legacy of secondary importance. The children of the dead cannot be as easily ventriloquized into the violence of the American cultural imagination: they do not accommodate as easily the orders of the armchair warrior, still fighting near Con Thien, Hill 937, An Loc. . . .

The Vietnam war will not be over until less attention is given to resurrecting the ghosts of the past, and more to those who solider on and carry the very real burdens of America’s South East Asian war. This means exorcising the image of the “combat vet,” this strange deity of the American cultural imagination who hovers between an experience we think we understand: the civilian volunteer or draftee; and one that we piously imagine we do not: that of the participant in apocalyptic violence.  This cultural icon, whose inarticulable experience is exhaustively spoken for by those who are currently capitalizing on marketing apocalypse, has been used to both silence and humiliate the real Vietnam veteran and the survivors of the deceased. 

Until American culture accepts that the living are among the most important “warriors” of the Vietnam war, and that far from being its orphans, are in fact its most sacred legacy; until American culture abandons its obsession with the mythical cult of combat (conveniently projected upon those who cannot speak for themselves, the dead) and pays attention to those who are the war’s survivors; the war, so strangely intertwined with American culture’s fascination with violence, will continue to generate very real orphans.

The Meaning of the Vietnam Veteran, Vietnam War

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