COLUMN ONE : Vietnam’s Hold on America : Even after a generation, the emotional baggage of the war has not been set aside. The presidential race has released old demons.

When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Seventeen years after the last helicopter lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, the Vietnam War still plays games with our national psyche, opening wounds we thought were healed and forcing us to re-examine all that we tried to forget.

For a generation of Americans--including the 3 million men who went to Indochina and the 13 million others who were eligible to go but did not--Vietnam was not a country as much as a state of mind. It was where our childhood ended and the long, dark shadows of the Ashau Valley began.

No conflict in our history lasted as long; only the Civil War was as divisive. And, somewhere between Dong Hoi near the DMZ and Ca Mau in the Mekong Delta, the character of an American era was defined. The era challenged the standards of World War II--the yardstick against which we had judged heroism and the rightness of battle for a generation--and turned society topsy-turvy with drugs, free love, political scandals and assassinations, interracial strife, protest demonstrations and the cry: “Hell, no! We won’t go!”

Just when we thought the emotional statute of limitations had finally run out on Vietnam, as President Bush told us it had in his inaugural address, just when we thought our flash victory in Operation Desert Storm had buried lingering doubts about national resolve, out of the closet again pops the specter of Vietnam--this time to haunt the presidential aspirations of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

If the war was so unpopular, if it was a misadventure, as is now widely believed, why should Clinton be penalized for deciding, as an anguished young man, not to rush off to the jungles of Vietnam? After all, John Wayne--deferred from the World Was II draft because of his age (34) and a football shoulder injury--and Army Capt. Ronald Reagan--who spent the war years making military movies in Hollywood--are viewed as patriots. Why, then, should we care if a candidate served in Vietnam or legally avoided it?

“This is meant to be the age in which politics is essentially image, not issues, not ideology, not political parties,” explained Alan Clem, a professor of political science at the University of South Dakota. “So we want to know not only if this guy has a nice smile and a good haircut, we want to know purely personal things, from his marital record to his military record.

“A war record, I think, is part of a candidate’s vita , in the same way our students at the university fill out their vitae and have to identify the important things they’ve done in their lives. A war record is simply one of the things you look for.”

So, a quarter century and another war later, Vietnam still stalks us. Did the heroes go and the weak stay home, or was it somehow the other way around? We showered soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf with parades, partly to ease the guilt of having ignored Vietnam veterans for so long. We file, night and day, seven days a week, nearly 40 million of us in a decade, past the black granite wall memorial in Arlington National Cemetery and gaze on the names of those who fell in a war that had no real beginning and no real end.

Then, when we think it is all behind us, a state representative in Atlanta introduces presidential aspirant Bob Kerrey--who earned the Medal of Honor in Vietnam--with words that are a slap at Clinton: “We want a President to be Commander in Chief, not commander in chicken.” It is as though we are trapped at the wall, grieving and groping, unable to move beyond it.

John Wheeler, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who played a major role in getting the wall built, wrote his friend Kerrey after his Atlanta appearance and suggested that he resist making Vietnam a campaign issue. For Kerrey to attack Clinton’s avoidance of military service, Wheeler said, would only make Vietnam harder to bury and risk having the issue influence presidential politics in elections to come.

“The Vietnam vets,” Wheeler wrote, “have to say in a firm and final fashion that what folks did in the ‘60s is just a footnote, that it is time to tell the demon of guilt and anger from that era to be gone, that from this time forward no vet should ever point the finger and challenge another man’s choices in the 1960s.”

One thing that has helped to keep that anger alive so long is the memory of the unfair laws that determined who would go to Vietnam. Every able-bodied male of appropriate age was vulnerable in World War II, but the draft system of the ‘60s protected those with money, connections or education. It enabled Dick Cheney, now secretary of defense, to remain in school through a series of deferments. Patrick J. Buchanan, an enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam War, stayed home with a bad knee.

“Everyone of that generation was acutely aware of what he didn’t do, of the road not taken,” said University of Wisconsin political scientist Donald Emmerson. “The grunt in Da Nang dodging fire was aware of the choice he didn’t make--namely, not to go AWOL, and the person eking out an existence in Canada was aware of the charge of cowardice, that he didn’t have the guts to go.”

By 1970, the year Doug Marlette was granted conscientious-objector status, the military had among its force of 2.7 million nearly 230,000 AWOLs and 90,000 deserters. As an objector, Marlette has written, he was “a first in my family, my church, my town, my zip code and (it felt like) my planet.” His father, a retired Marine Corps officer, wrote the draft board in Florida and offered to serve in his son’s place.

“Nothing seemed more absurd and horrible and went against everything you were taught in Sunday school and civics class,” Marlette, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning political cartoonist with New York Newsday, said of the war era recently. “But I couldn’t find anything that felt right, that made me really feel comfortable personally. Even if you did (object), you felt you should have gone to jail, that those who went to jail really had conviction.”

If Marlette was confused, so was everyone else. “You’ve got to remember,” said former newsman Larry Lichty of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Center, “that during the ’68 (Democratic) convention in Chicago, we really did think the country was coming apart.”

“The idealism of John Kennedy’s Peace Corps vision was barely behind us, the hope for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was still with us, and here we were, destroying a country in a distant war we chose not to win, confounded by bloated body counts and the deceptiveness of our own leadership. We couldn’t even agree whether the real Americans were Jane Fonda and Father Philip Berrigan or John Wayne and Cardinal Cushing,” he said.

“This used to be a hell of a good country,” said the drunken lawyer played by Jack Nicholson in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”

“I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”

Perhaps we would be foolish to assume we could shed the emotional baggage of Vietnam in a generation’s time, especially when so much remains to remind us: the unresolved issue of more than 2,000 POWs and MIAs, our government’s unwillingness to establish diplomatic relations with Hanoi, the presence of half a million Vietnamese in the United States, the flap over Vice President Dan Quayle’s National Guard service in that era, our leaders’ promises that the Persian Gulf would be “no Vietnam” and popular movies, such as Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” portraying American troops as slightly psychopathic misfits.

“What happened in Vietnam was not the fault of the American fighting man,” said former war correspondent Neil Sheehan, whose book on Vietnam, “A Bright Shining Lie,” won a Pulitzer Prize. “In fact, he did his best. What happened was the fault of the political leadership in this country. The American soldier was the victim of his own political and military leaders, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.”

Americans in Vietnam did fight bravely and often with conviction--238 of them earned Medals of Honor--but what made that war so different was that it left us nothing to celebrate. We hardly lost a battle, yet we remain emotionally stuck at a besieged firebase with no American flag to plant firmly in the ground. “And if there is no celebration of accomplishment, what do you do? You continue to mourn,” said John Minnick of the Vietnam Veterans of America. “You go back to the wall, again and again. When Iowa wants to honor the Vietnam vets, what does it do? It builds a wall, a place to grieve. The wall has been a tremendously important symbol to the Vietnam vet, but we have to go beyond it.”

There is, though, in the psyche of a nation that has fought 11 wars on foreign soil at a cost of 600,000 dead, a voice that tells us all American wars are honorable and that, when called, one’s duty is simply to go. It’s part of punching the clock to adulthood, a badge no politician has ever had to justify.

Every American President, from Harry S. Truman to George Bush (a decorated World War II bomber pilot), has been a veteran. The two most highly rated PBS television series are about war: “The Civil War” and “Vietnam: A TV History.” War toys and war video games are part of our culture. And so, too, is Vietnam now. Like every traumatic event in our history, it sets us as individuals in a time and place and raises a question that is asked by this generation and will be asked by the next:

“Where were you during Vietnam?”

Vietnam: Right or Wrong?

Do you think the United States was right or wrong to send troops to fight in Vietnam? Wrong: 55% Right: 32% Not sure: 11% No answer: 2% Source: Los Angeles Times Poll taken in May, 1990. Based on 2,144 responses. Margin of error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.