‘I Was a Coward. I Went to the War.’

Women, children and old men slaughtered in a free-fire zone. Shame, denial, anguish over tainted American heroism, the doubting of accounts from “the other side.” Here we are again, so many decades later, back on the ground in another Vietnam horror-scape, this time with former Sen. Bob Kerrey. It’s like one of those nightmares in which something chases you until you wake up, and the second you close your eyes, there it is again.

Our responses to this always forgotten, always familiar scenario are by now no less familiar. There’s the invocation of the “tragedy” of Vietnam--by which no one means Vietnam, the land or its people--but “Vietnam,” an American war that somehow went drastically astray. There’s the breast-beating, and then the breast-beating about the breast-beating, in all of which the Vietnamese are “mere shadows,” as the scholar and former antiwar activist H. Bruce Franklin puts it in “Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.” They are, he says while discussing “Dispatches,” Michael Herr’s classic down-and-dirty journalistic account of the war, merely “hobgoblins in America’s bad trip.”

Above all, our postwar version of Vietnam has largely been restricted either to the experiences of American “grunts” on the ground in a relatively brief period when our casualties soared or to fantasy POWs still imagined to be in prisons somewhere in Southeast Asia--a mythology devastatingly dismantled by Franklin in a previous book “MIA or Mythmaking in America” (and reprised in a chapter of this collection). In popular culture, the replay button has been hit again and again as Americans watched a stripped-down version of a lost war that, depending on your dating, lasted from 1945 or 1954 or 1961 to the fall of Saigon in 1975--if, that is, you don’t toss in the Cambodian horrors that followed or the Chinese-Vietnamese war that was linked to it or the three decades of loss and revenge fantasies that are part and parcel of our lives. (Even that “greatest generation” World War II film, “Saving Private Ryan,” is a distinctly post-Vietnam fable, focused as it is on a patrol of grunts extracting an MIA from behind enemy lines.)

Of course, as Franklin points out, our focus on the American ground war has also led to “an astonishing body of imaginative literature” written by American vets. He calls it “the second of the two great Vietnam War achievements in which Americans can legitimately take pride.” Momentarily leaving aside the first of those achievements, the stories, novels, memoirs and poems still pouring out from former grunts have indeed sometimes driven us beyond where the rest of the culture has been willing to go. Take the last lines of a poem by W.D. Ehrhart, quoted in Franklin’s book. Ehrhart, wounded in the battle for the old Vietnamese imperial capital Hue in 1968, speaks of patrolling one of “those strange Asian villages where nothing ever seemed quite human but myself and my few grim friends moving through them hunched in line,” whose inhabitants, as we’ve recently been reminded by Kerrey, did not live in houses or even huts but “hootches” (as rabbits live in hutches). Suddenly, he leaps into a Vietnamese space few enough Americans have been willing to enter, asking, “When they tell stories to their children/of the evil/that awaits misbehavior,/is it me they conjure?” Or take Tim O’Brien’s 1994 novel “In the Lake of the Woods,” which takes direct aim at American denial in a story that now feels eerily prescient about a Minnesota lieutenant governor whose presence at the My Lai massacre leaks out during his race for the U.S. Senate. Let’s admit, watching Dan Rather interrogate Kerrey on “60 Minutes II” about the SEAL kidnap and assassination team he led into the village of Thanh Phong, that the phrase “war crimes” still has an odd ring on prime-time TV. However shocking, though, there’s also something deceptive about this bit of recovered memory that seems to reach so high without taking us anywhere new. Unlike My Lai’s Lt. William Calley, Lt. Kerrey, of course, went on to become a governor, a senator and a presidential candidate before accepting the presidency of the New School University in New York. His subsequent celebrity gives a thus-fall-the-high-and-mighty feel to his present situation, even as we find ourselves yet again on patrol in Vietnam, dealing with atrocity, the Mbius loop of memory and the fog of war without a commander in sight. (Just as in popular culture, the command-level war film, once so popular, has long disappeared.) Perhaps the shock, then, is in imagining that we might have had a man sitting in the White House who committed heinous acts in a foreign land in the dark of night.

But, of course, we actually did. Let’s remember Richard Nixon, who, like the generals and civilian managers of that era, came to think of all Vietnam as a vast free-fire zone, a place that in the name of freedom could be transformed into a charnel house. If, as Franklin argues, one profound legacy of the Vietnam era was a deep and abiding distrust of our own government (think of all those “X-Files”-style action movie plots powered by evil government conspiracies), the actual men who prosecuted the war have with rare exceptions (as in Christopher Hitchens’ recent attack on Henry Kissinger) remained beyond responsibility. It’s as if the Pentagon Papers had never been leaked to The New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, as if Vietnam had been the accidental war of a bunch of junior officers and stressed-out GIs.

The brain is, of course, a story-making machine. And, like wars, war stories are bound to have their share of MIAs. Still, it’s important to ask why (despite some fine scholarly and popular writings on the subject) so much of the Vietnam War has remained for us largely missing in action. The story of the domestic antiwar movement stands out among the missing subjects that might help us make a different sense of that era. Despite its impact at the time, no body of literature, no set of films, no form of popular culture has memorialized it. Rather, it has been reduced in American memory to a few stereotyped cameo roles--of hippies, for instance, spitting on returning soldiers or ofspoiled, affluent children throwing bombs.

Franklin’s work is an important antidote to this. His deepest subject is denial. He focuses on the fantasies Americans have long spun out in popular culture to avoid a full encounter with a lost war. In his work lies the beginning of a history of what we haven’t been able to face, though “Vietnam and Other American Fantasies” is partly a patched-together reprise of work done earlier and elsewhere.

New here, however, is his attempt to battle American amnesia by highlighting that first great Vietnam-era “achievement” in which, he believes, we might legitimately take pride. As he says pointedly, “One would never be able to guess from public discourse that for every American veteran of combat in Vietnam, there must be twenty veterans of the antiwar movement.” In his chapter “The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget,” he vividly reminds us how widespread opposition to the war became; how it was not concentrated among affluent college students or even among the affluent among college students; how intense it was among people of color; how peaceful the protests were for so long; how impressively such opposition grew (“By 1971 civil disobedience was so widespread that the number arrested in that spring demonstration in Washington--14,000--would have been considered a good-sized march in 1965”); how significant was opposition in the military itself, in which sabotage, desertion and resistance probably reached historic levels. His account of how antiwar sailors managed to halt aircraft carriers on their way to the war zone--”Not since Pearl Harbor had the U.S. Navy been so crippled”--is eye-opening. Finally, in a feat of historical recovery, Franklin drives the history of opposition to the war back to 1945, when the crewmen of American troopships returning U.S.-armed French soldiers to their former colony to put down Ho Chi Minh’s newly proclaimed regime, drew up letters of protest or sent cablegrams to President Truman.

Though the antiwar movement never proved capable of halting the war, without its existence and persistence, the carnage would undoubtedly have reached even more unimaginable levels. Certainly, the growing opposition caused every presidential candidate except Barry Goldwater from 1964 to war’s end to run “as some kind of self-professed peace candidate.”

Over and over again since the 1970s, we have relentlessly pursued only one set of MIAs into endless postwar fantasy jungles and only one set of heroes into those villages where hootches burned and atrocities occurred. If Bob Kerrey is to be America’s “hero” for that era, we are all fated to be caught in the same loop of denial, limited memory and horror that leads nowhere. Every society chooses its heroes. The inability to imagine a heroic journey that doesn’t lead through those villages says much about us. Franklin would prefer it otherwise. And yet there’s one journey even he can hardly see.

Among the buried stories of the era, none has been less memorialized or more quickly forgotten than the exodus of American protesters, draft dodgers and deserters to Canada (or England or Sweden), though any path that led a soldier or potential soldier away from the village of Thanh Phong might seem, in retrospect, to have had a certain value. Even Franklin’s book has only two passing references to the exodus of young Americans who were denounced by then-Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan as “malingerers, opportunists, criminals, and cowards,” labels which have stuck. Two new books, however, have just been published on this largely untouched subject: John Hagan’s scholarly study mainly of Americans who settled in Toronto, “Northern Passage,” and journalist Jack Todd’s memoir with the candid title “Desertion.” Both are by Americans who went north in flight and in protest and settled into productive postwar lives there. For each, the move north--”Exiles go to Paris, not to Montreal,” comments Todd wryly--was a disorienting leap into an unknown land. “I have given up my country, my citizenship, my profession, my family, my belief in myself, my true love, everything but my life. For this I will be called a coward,” writes Todd in one vivid passage.

Though hardly on the scale of the peasants who crowded into South Vietnam’s cities during the years of America’s bombing campaigns and free-fire zones or of the boat people who fled a communist Vietnam in the postwar years, this movement of young Americans north was still staggering enough for a country officially at peace and with a deeply patriotic populace. John Hagan estimates conservatively that more than 50,000 American “war resisters,” draft dodgers (a term that north of the border “still has a positive resonance”) and military deserters went to Canada in those years, “the largest politically motivated migration from the United States since the United Empire Loyalists moved north to oppose the American Revolution.” It was a rare American case of voting with one’s feet on the policies of one’s country.

Among the fascinating things tucked away in “Northern Passage” is a complex tale of how the Canadians came to take pride in their new immigrants as “unexpected symbols of Canadian sovereignty” and of how many of the war resisters had been involved in antiwar and sometimes civil rights protests before their departures and continued their protests in Canada. In those years, Hagan calculates, “slightly more U.S. women than men came to Canada,” a staggering detail because such women can’t be accused of draft-dodging, no less of cowardice. And so, like the women in the antiwar movement, they are no longer considered at all.

Both these books should be welcomed for breaking the ice on a subject that still awaits its great writers. Todd offers some striking passages, especially on the confusions of a patriotic Nebraska boy turning against a war while in basic training and on a childhood friend who returns from a tour of Vietnam, hinting at his own Thanh Phong and urging Todd not to go to war. But as a memoir, it seems to follow a well-worn path when none yet exists to fit Todd’s experience. Hagan’s book offers useful information but with its charts, appendices, arguments with other academics and uninspired language, it too disappoints. Both are implicitly defensive, still essentially responses to the epithets that Buchanan and so many others threw at them. The Canadian exodus awaits its Tim O’Brien, whose 1990 Vietnam masterpiece, “The Things They Carried,” still contains the most original account of an attempted flight north, with its final lines worthy of a new literature of the era--”I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.”

The antiwar movement in all its variety was never silenced during the Vietnam War, but it has been since. Those citizens--and there were many of them--who joined in protests of every conceivable sort, partly to protect villagers in the Thanh Phongs of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from Kerrey and his team, are no longer an essential part of American memory even when incidents like Kerrey’s rise to the surface. Their acts are now imagined as embarrassing; their urge to stop those SEALS from having to enter that village valueless and their lives without heroism of any sort.

We should advertise somewhere: Pioneers needed to create an alternative epic, to return the exoduses of those years fully to the map of memory. Whether we know it or not, we need a fuller recounting, a fuller definition, a fuller vision of the acts and damages of that war that won’t go away, that haunts us from the recesses of our minds. There is a literature still waiting to be written.