Perhaps this aberration exists because Viet Nam was a blow that fractured lives along class lines. I certainly don’t mean this statement in any orthodox sense. The parameters of the classes, while partly economic, were by no means completely so.
Yet it remains a fact that a massive cultural experience developed in this country and overwhelming percentages of select groups of Americans were able first to reject its existence and then to ignore its significance and consequences.
If Fred were here (he’s at a business conference), he would jump in and say, “Numbers, damn it! Give me statistics that document what you say. Glittering generalities, outlandish hyperboles, that’s all you people ever use.”
But I will not document my statement with specific statistics. Veterans have an inherent mistrust of specific statistical examples.
I stepped on a booby trap thirty-five yards from a village listed in the “Completely Secure” category on the American High Command’s impressive statistics board in Saigon. At the time 95.2% of all villages in Viet Nam were classified as “Completely Secure” or “Secure.” After all they had to be if we were winning the war, and we had to be winning the war because our government said we were. Three days later a good friend of mine was killed in another “Completely Secure” village.
And the beat goes on: a few weeks ago I heard a government spokesman announce in conjunction with a labor dispute that if you looked at the figures properly, three times ten did not exceed twenty-one. (I must apologize for my irreverence toward The Powers That Be. “What are you,” Fred always says, “a fucking pinko?”)
As the supportive evidence for my outlandish exaggerations, I will introduce only the unscientific “boonie barometer,” a homespun evaluative mechanism that was popular in Viet Nam’s rice paddies and bunkers. Those utilizing the boonie barometer first carefully considered the words, facts, and figures that experts would marshal to explain this particular war. Then they discarded them all in favor of the two blunt conclusions that coincided with reality was we lived it: where bullets were flying, there you would find high concentrations of minorities and low-rent whites; where bullets were not flying, there you would find everyone else.
Our opponents were not nice people, but they did a better job at making that war what war should be, a burden shouldered by the entire communal family. I don’t claim that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighting force completely mirrored all levels of the society that bore it. But they tried, all of our propaganda to the contrary, and they succeeded to the limited degree that God grants human success.
Their effort and achievement explained why, year after year, as Time Magazine swayed one way, then another; as Westmoreland went and Abrams came; as Congress debated legality, morality, and practicality; the guys in the boonies bitched at the Cong with reluctant admiration and knew –I mean knew—we didn’t have a prayer in hell of winning that war. And—it galled us bitterly—we didn’t deserve to win it. They were doing it the right way and we were not.
And the beat goes on again. If you have any confidence in the new volunteer army: don’t. Most of America isn’t in this one either.
Fred, back from his conference, can’t accept such “inflamed and irresponsible rhetoric” without a response. Says he, “Who the hell put you on the stage? You catch one bad break and complain the next twenty years. I have a family. I have a job. I don’t bring the family to work and I don’t bring the job home. All you guys have a martyr complex. Why did you have to bring that stupid war home anyway?”
Is it possible not to bring a war home? While in Viet Nam I spoke with North Vietnamese prisoners and defectors. Since then I have conversed with Israeli combat vets and American veterans of World War II and Korea. We are different in so many ways, but we are all alike in one way: each of us his own Snowden.