2006-04-19 - 6:03 p.m.
Yesterday Nya had the day off work, so we went out together. In the evening she was about to say what a fun day we�d had, but stopped herself short. We had gone to the National Vietnam Veterans� Art Museum. �Fun� didn�t quite seem the appropriate word. �Interesting�, perhaps. �Informative�. But not quite �fun�. As one quoted veteran put it when asked what he thought of Vietnam as a place: �Boy, this looks real beautiful with all the white sand beaches and greenery. It�s too bad there�s a war going on with all these dead bodies lying around!�
We went because I wanted to see the �Purple Hearts� exhibit � photos and interviews with some of the thousands of soldiers injured in 2002-2003 in Iraq. One guy expressed bitterness that he hadn�t even been awarded a Purple Heart medal and felt like his sacrifice wasn�t being recognized. Some had lost limbs, eyes, skin, parts of their brain. All obviously had the less visible problem of combat trauma. Some regretted going, some didn�t.
And they looked so young. The photographs of Vietnam War soldiers in the surrounding exhibits looked even younger. One kid obviously must have been 18 but looked like he was about 12. Some of the contemporary soldiers had enlisted for reasons that make more sense to a youth. Said one: �I signed on when a recruiter called looking for my brother. I figured I wouldn�t have to do homework anymore. Plus just, y�know. You get to wear a cool looking uniform.� Now he has a prosthetic leg. I guess he actually didn�t have to do any more homework, though.
When we first got to the museum, we listened in to a veteran who was speaking to a visiting group of high school students. When he opened up to questions, someone asked him what Vietnam War movies he liked. He said they were pretty much all unrealistic and inaccurate. Someone else asked about fitting back into society once he came back from active duty. He of course talked about how you can never fully stand down from battle-edginess and can never truly explain it to anyone who wasn�t there.
I raised my hand and asked about why he felt reincorporating into peacetime society seemed so much easier now then it had in the Vietnam era. Had he seen Coming Home with Jon Voight? It focuses a lot on reintegrating. He pointed out something that I�d never thought about and to which little media attention seems to have been given. Except for the initial deployments into Vietnam, where a pre-existing unit was given the same assignment, the draft meant later servicemen served a tour of duty on their own schedule.
Today, already-established groups of soldiers are assigned to the same place. The 82nd Airborne was sent to Tikrit from its home base of Fort Bragg, NC. Or even weekend-warriors, like say the 98th Army Reserve Division from Rochester, NY. These people have all known each other for a while and trained together. They are sent in together and withdrawn together. When you come back home, you have a network of friends who shared the same experiences and who you probably still see every day.
By contrast, service in Vietnam was generally disjointed and completely separate from the rest of your life. You might become best buddies with a fellow soldier in the field. But when you got back, he might still be there and he was from a thousand miles away anyway. With your military tour as a totally isolated experience from the rest of your life, you would probably think what the heck just happened to me? What was that all about? Today, our all-volunteer army may volunteer for the sketchiest of reasons. But at least overseas duty makes more sense as an integrated episode.
Of course the reasons why soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat at while those returning now are asked to kiss babies would take lifetimes to explore. Such broad societal changes can�t be simplified to: stronger networks of soldiers serving together before and after seeing combat led to an easier reintegration into civilian life. But that certainly had something to do with it. And no, the Vietnam veteran said. He hadn�t seen Coming Home because it had Jane Fonda in it.
Oh, yeah. I�d forgotten about the whole Hanoi Jane thing. I repeated my insensitive forgetfulness later in an elevator. A younger woman was asking two veterans what movies about the Vietnam War they�d recommend. They also said most film depictions were pretty unrealistic, although We Were Soldiers came closest to getting it right. I piped up that she should check out Coming Home; it was really good. The two veterans glared at me darkly. Jane Fonda. Nya squeezed my shoulder hard, signaling that I should shut up.
Reputations (and I won�t speculate about whether Fonda�s is deserved or not; it wasn�t my time and it�s not my business now) die hard. Extreme events like the Vietnam War can seal perceived standing especially hard. The Jane Fonda/Coming Home thing reminded me of something that happened my first year at Brown. Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris came to screen an early test cut of his biopic of Robert McNamara to see how an audience received it. (Justin, singer of Bishop Allen, once worked for Morris. Not really relevant, but I haven�t made a Bishop Allen reference in a while.)
After the screening Morris stood in front of the auditorium and asked if there were questions. One fifty-something guy got up and started absolutely ranting. Bob McNamara was total scum! If it weren�t for McNamara, he wouldn�t have been waist-deep in leeches thirty-five years ago! If it weren�t for McNamara, his friends and platoon-mates wouldn�t have lost their lives in some God-forsaken jungle! He didn�t want to see a movie about McNamara�s life; he wanted to piss down his throat! Etc., etc. Man, I thought. Who let this guy in?
Errol Morris apologized that the man felt so upset. Much of the film (which eventually was released as The Fog of War) focused, not on the Vietnam War when McNamara was Secretary of Defense, but on World War II, when he was working out the gory logistics of dropping bombs and killing people and other details that most of us don�t want to think about. Morris felt McNamara was a compelling subject because of this attention to the exact workings of making war. He wasn�t trying to make any political statement. The irate audience member disgustedly got up and left.
�Boy,� I said to my friend after everything was over and we�d left the building. �How about that guy who got up all enraged? Do you think he was like some crazy homeless person off the street who just snuck in for the screening?�
�Oh yeah, that dude. He�s my professor.�
� 2006 Geoff Gladstone
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