Long Time Passing

Vietnam and the Haunted Generation

Myra MacPherson

• Editore: Indiana University Press
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780253002761
• Argomento: Storia
• Categoria: Guerra del Vietnam

This new edition of a classic book on the impact of the Vietnam War on Americans reintroduces the haunted voices of the Vietnam era to a new generation of readers. Based on more than 500 interviews, Long Time Passing is journalist Myra MacPherson's acclaimed exploration of the wounds, pride, and guilt of those who fought and those who refused to fight the war that continues to envelop the psyche of this nation. In a new introduction, Myra MacPherson reflects on what has changed, and what hasn't, in the years since these interviews were conducted, explains the key points of reference from the 1980s that feature prominently in them, and brings the stories of her principal characters up to date. "A haunting chorus of voices, a moving deeply disturbing evocation of an era." — San Francisco Chronicle "A brilliant and necessary book... this stunning depiction of Vietnam's bitter fruit is calculated to agitate even the most complacent American." — Philadelphia Inquirer "There have been many books on the Vietnam War, but few have captured its second life as memory better than Long Time Passing." — Washington Post Book World "Enthralling reading... full of deep and strong emotions." — New York Times

Part I

Long Time Passing

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

BY PETE SEEGER

Where have all the flowers gone?

Long time passing....

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the soldiers gone?

Long time ago.

They’ve gone to graveyards, every one.

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone?

Gone to flowers every one.

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Oh, when will they ever learn?

Copyright 1961, Fall River Music, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Prologue

THIS BOOK LOOKS AT ONE FACET OF THE PROFOUNDLY COMPLEX Vietnam War—the generation that came of age then. The ones who went and the ones who didn’t: the men who were asked to fight the war and what they did about that decision—and how that long-ago youthful move shaped their lives; the women who were exposed to combat as nurses in Vietnam and those who saw combat on the streets and campuses of America.

Many of the disparate voices of that generation come together here. In essence, they were the foot soldiers in both armies. Those in Vietnam were far removed from the manipulations of the policymakers who put them there. Those on the streets or striking on campuses were equally removed from the manipulation of the most flamboyant and incendiary of their leaders who—thrust into prominence by the media and caught up in factions and ego power trips—muddied the public’s perception of the movement’s many faces. And there are also voices from that vast army who made few moral commitments on either side and were simply swept up by the times.

Perhaps the Vietnam veteran would have stayed forever a stranger to me had I not watched Friendly Fire on television in 1979. Like many, I had subconsciously avoided revisiting that war during the seventies. I had read none of the many excellent books—Dispatches, A Rumor of War, Friendly Fire, To What End, Fields of Fire, Winners and Losers, Fire in the Lake, Going After Cacciato.... I had studied none of the moving psychological studies, such as Home from the War or Strangers at Home.

Then I watched Carol Burnett, with the burned-out stare of a stricken mother, playing Peg Mullen, the Iowa farm woman who lost her son to “friendly fire” in Vietnam. What stayed with me was the scene with her son in the airport, saying goodbye, hovering, buying the magazines, trying to say something cheerful for the last time. I cried, transferring my thoughts to my own nineteen-year-old son and all those other sons who are eighteen and nineteen. President Reagan now sends a new generation of soldiers into foreign lands, some of them to their deaths. I see those faces—the new, young generation, all peach fuzz and teenage acne—and now I finally know what those mothers of the sixties felt.

At the end of Friendly Fire, a ticker tape sentence marched across the bottom of the TV screen: HONOR VIETNAM VETERANS‘ WEEK. I started up from the sofa in cold anger. Some mythical “they” were at work.

They’re at it again. They’re eulogizing, glorifying another war, I thought. I had nothing but contempt for such hollow holidays. As satirist Mark Russell says, “Every Memorial Day we honor our war dead by going to the beach and staying drunk for three days.” I felt as if some superpatriots were trying to gloss over the pain and agony, trying to make Vietnam an “acceptable noble cause” for a new generation. Another Memorial Day on which to mythologize about the glories of dying in war. I was not thinking of the veteran.

But then curiosity took over. Vietnam. I wanted to know. I had not truly thought of it in years. And so I suggested a series on veterans for the Washington Post. I met Lonnie Sparks, whose only dream of glory was to work in the Chevrolet plant in Muncie, Indiana. Both legs are gone. He plays in wheelchair basketball tournaments, shoots pool, can’t work. He uses his arms to get in and out of the wheelchair, slides his body along the grass as he plays with his two daughters, born since his return. I met Eddie, who lost a leg, and Steve Zardis, who thinks he is dying of the insidious aftereffects of Agent Orange. I met Tom Vallely, who in 1971 threw his medals at the Capitol—along with thousands of other Vietnam Veterans Against the War—and who is now a Massachusetts state politician. None of these veterans was whining; they told me things I had never realized about their lives after their return. That was in 1979. I did not get a chance for full-time research on my book until 1981.

By that time I was stunned at how the public’s awareness of Vietnam veterans had changed dramatically in less than two years—from 1979 to 1981. Still, there was resistance to the veteran, as well as to reliving the war.

This book seeks neither to prove the lightness or wrongness of the war nor to refight old ideological battles but to illuminate the effect of the war as it was on the generation asked to fight it. In so doing, however, ideology and attitudes toward government policy come into play constantly. Sometimes their arguments are simplistic, sometimes profound. Whatever the view, it is the truth as they perceive it about a cataclysmic time in their adolescence that, in large part, shaped the men and women they are today.

To this day, many veterans feel an indescribable rage that they, for so long, seemed to be the only Americans who remembered the war’s suffering and pain.

I was unprepared for the defensive recoiling of many other Americans—who do not yet want to hear what this generation has to say. “Why on earth would you want to write a book about that?” was not an uncommon question when I first began my research four years ago. “I don’t want to read a book about a bunch of whiny vets,” was the comment of a World War II combat officer. The mention of delayed stress invariably led to indignant moralizing about the horror in all wars. Have you read about the Civil War carnage, the cauterizing of stumps with irons while the patient was not anesthetized? The Battle of the Somme? The Bataan Death March? The only group free from such comparative judgment seemed to be the Vietnam veterans. As one said, “The only war you know is the one you were in.” And that is what they speak to.

Vietnam was the most divisive time of battle in our country since the Civil War. It was the third most pivotal experience in this century—following the Depression and World War II. Its consequences are still being felt in our foreign policy, our troubled economy, in a haunted generation, in the new generation faced with possible new Vietnams, and in our hearts and minds. And yet because we lost many refuse to face its monumental importance.

There are several binding themes; I have risked repetition to allow for many to express their variations on them because these generalizations are central to how people view their specific lives and actions in the aftermath of Vietnam. Each time, the elaboration explains something about the person speaking.

Among these themes is the pervasive frustration of combat veterans who felt they lost friends and were wounded in a war they either could not or were not allowed to win. Some grasp the domestic and geopolitical reasons why this terrible war was conducted as it was; others do not. Some respond from deep emotional wounds, with no ordered arguments, but I have let them talk because, in the end, their perception is what matters.

Another theme, encountered in every veteran I have ever met, is searing anger at their homecoming—of being shunned, of having to expunge the most indelible year from their lives, of having to become “closet” vets. And for many there is the depression that comes from the feeling that it was all a waste.

Among the men who didn’t go, the range is wide—from guilt or sheepishness over how the veteran was treated or guilt for the less-than-honorable way in which many ducked the draft to an earnest defense of their actions, sometimes with sixties’ rhetoric intact.

We hear from exiles who fled the country, men who chose jail, those who bought or faked their way out, and those who were simply passed over.

All of their decisions shaped their lives in ways that some as yet do not comprehend. They—and their families, friends, intimates—speak from deep wells of pain and private memories, from conviction and confusion, from joyous as well as scarring experiences. In all, over 500 people were interviewed, including historians, sociologists, psychiatrists, as well as members of the Vietnam Generation.

Today generational divisions are not even along so simple a line as those who went and those who didn’t. A Vietnam veteran who returned vehemently antiwar has more in common, for example, with a former dedicated resister than he does with a veteran who champions the “lightness” of the war.

The echoes of Vietnam can be heard in debates over supporting right-wing Central American regimes, troops in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada. Once again those arguments are breaking down along the lines of right and left among veterans who strongly supported our presence in Vietnam and those who didn’t.

Vietnam was a swirling, ever-changing place that in itself defies a simple common shared experience. Veterans who saw heavy combat and those who saw little do not speak the same language. Nor do those who went in 1964, when the country was moving through the long twilight of cold war containment, have much of a bond with the reluctant draftee who went to a hot and futile war in 1970. “Everyone wants to capsulize Vietnam,” sighed one former helicopter pilot who works with veterans, “and they just can’t.”

Simply trying to get a handle on Vietnam statistics is a frustrating shuffle through a paper maze of conflicting numbers. Experts disagree on how many saw combat and how many were in transport units. They even disagree on how many actually were sent to Southeast Asia.

For several years government statistics about the number of Americans who served in Southeast Asia ranged from 2.8 million to 3.2 million. However, recent reports and analyses of persons on active duty have led to a larger figure. Of the approximately 9 million Vietnam-era veterans, 42 percent—or 3.78 million—served in the war zone during the eleven years of United States participation. The war zone is defined as Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and adjacent sea and air space.¹

Systematic underreporting of who was serving in the Vietnam theater at the time of the war accounts for the discrepancies. In this book the larger numbers are used when referring to those who served in Vietnam.

Vietnam was a multiphased war that produced vastly different impressions as changed political atmosphere in America brought changed military strategy over there. A lingering, subtle, and insidious indifference is directed at the men who bore the brunt of this lost war. Among intellectuals and shapers of policy, there is residual condescension, although it is no longer fashionable, a minimizing of the thoughts and remembrances of young foot soldiers. After all, what did they know? They were only there. Never mind that they have a poetry and depth of their own, that their experiences can electrify far more than armchair participants who mouth their “if you wills” and “so to speaks” and dredge up all those polysyllabic cover words like “harassment” and “interdiction” for the killing that took place.

“Every soldier exaggerates and lies—including me,” chuckled a World War II combat hero friend of mine by way of warning. And one colonel warned incoming troops that it would take them years to sort out all that they would see and feel. And even then maybe they would not understand. Still, no matter how small their deadly terrain, no matter how narrow their focus, their stories build, in many instances, to remarkable insights about that war, how it was fought, and what happened to those who returned.

These portraits are veritable cascades—subjective remembrances and opinions. A comment of Virginia Woolf applies.

“When a subject is highly controversial ... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncracies of the speaker....”²

“In their remembrances are their truths,” wrote Studs Terkel of the men and women chronicled in his book on the Depression, Hard Times. “This is not a lawyer’s brief nor an annotated sociological treatise. It is simply an attempt to get the story of the holocaust known as the Great Depression from an improvised battalion of survivors.”³

And so speak these voices of the sixties generation—my “improvised battalion of survivors.” It is my hope that those on both sides will listen to one another and, in so listening, will begin to understand their differences.

And those differences are complex and volatile. For every nongoer who sometimes thinks badly of the less-than-noble way he avoided the war, there is a soldier who blames himself for having gone. For every resister who takes pride in not having gone, there is a soldier who takes pride in his service. And many times the emotions are ambiguous and mixed. The same veterans who can look back a decade, and now take pride in their service, can also feel the war was wrong. Other veterans cannot even fathom why people their age protested. And some protesters cannot fathom why someone would have chosen to go.

Expressing their diverse feelings is important. I am continually amazed at those on both sides—the ones who went and those who didn’t—who told me they were speaking of their experiences for the first time. Maybe in their coming together, some of the past can be laid to rest.

Above all, this is a generation in transition. Their sense of history will change ten, twenty years from now. But there is enough distance, now, for a beginning.

Enough distance so that we can begin to erase our collective amnesia over the Vietnam War.

Enough distance so that we can begin to heal the wounds of our nation’s most troubled decade of war.

1 Two Soldiers

THE PATROL PICKED ITS WAY THROUGH JUNGLE SO THICK THAT BY noon it was dark. A dead, midnight kind of darkness. Fifty men threaded their way. The first ten began to cross a river. The soldier walking point touched something with his boot. It was not a twig, not a root, not a rock. It was a trip wire to oblivion. In an instant the wire triggered a huge, fifty-pound Chinese mine. There was an enormous roar, like the afterburner of a jet, as it exploded, instantly ripping the point man apart. Shrapnel flew for yards.

Tom, six feet tall and slim, at nineteen already developing a characteristic slouch, froze, hunched his shoulders, and, in a flash, caught the scene forever in his mind: the face of one buddy disintegrating from the explosion; others walking their last steps and falling, bones sticking white out of flesh sheared off at the hips. Some bled to death, coating the ground and mud and leaves with their last moments of blood, before the medevac choppers could come. Some were caught in the river. Tom always remembers the river, running red “like Campbell’s tomato soup.” Those that weren’t hit screamed in panic. Those that were screamed in pain.

Tom’s first thought, as always, was of Chuck. He whipped around and saw Chuck lying immobile, staring, with the most startled look Tom had ever seen on his face.

Tom wasn’t sure what was causing it—Chuck’s breathing or his heartbeat—but something was causing it. Every few seconds, a fountain of blood gushed from a wound in Chuck’s chest. Tom knelt and, with trembling fingers, grabbed a compression bandage, a thick cotton square with the bandage tied to it like a scarf. He wrap...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: A Generation Revisited
• Part I: Long Time Passing
• Part II: Draft and Protest
• Part III: Still in Saigon
• Part IV: Making It
• Part V: Resistance
• Part VI: Women and the War
• Part VII: Vietnam Kaleidoscope
• Epilogue: Requiem for a Generation
• Appendix: Postscript 1993
• Glossary
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author