Piecework

Ten years later, the anti-Communist sermon is again the dominant factor in our foreign policy. Those little men with the quartz eyes and pink hands who sit in safe Washington buildings are again signing papers that allow young men to go off and kill and die, in Beirut or Grenada or the hills of Nicaragua. The conquest of Grenada, which proved definitively that a nation of 235 million could overwhelm a country of 110,000, was greeted as a famous victory. The president was hailed as a firm leader, and medals dropped from the Pentagon like snow. Less than ten years after the end of the longest, most disastrous war in American history, we seemed to have learned nothing. Nothing at all.

Yet Vietnam will not go away. On the evening news, ten years later, we see General Westmoreland trying in a courtroom to win from CBS the victory that he could never wrest from General Giap. We see tearful ceremonies in the rain beside a generation’s wailing wall in Washington as those who lived through Vietnam come together to mourn those who did not. Occasionally we hear politicians, from President Reagan down, speaking of the war in the oratory of a Fourth of July picnic, attempting with porous language to transform disaster into victory, stupidity into wisdom, folly into glory.

But more than 2.6 million Americans passed through Vietnam, and they will carry with them until they die the psychic shrapnel of their time in that place. The names of the places are like beads in a bitter rosary: Khe Sanh, Pleiku, Ap Bac, Cam Ne, Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Hue, Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhut, the Iron Triangle, the Mekong, and a thousand others that evoke rain, helicopters, blasted trees, snake-colored rivers, the green watery light of forests, and the death of friends. They spoke a language that is now forgotten: incoming, L.Z., capping, medevac, Chinook, tree line, punji stick, spider hole, jolly green giant, trip wire, claymore, Huey, klick, body bag, pogue, Charlie, fragging, COSVN, in country, payback, slick, hootch, doo-mommie, gooks and dinks and slopes. These were the nouns of the war; the verbs didn’t matter, or the tenses; war is always present tense for the men who fight it, and combat is illiterate.

There were other nouns, of course, common and proper, all now abandoned and rusting like old weapons. Does anyone remember the face of Ngo Dinh Diem, plucked from a Maryknoll retreat in New Jersey in 1954 to become president of the South Vietnam he had not seen in years? Diem was a Catholic in a Buddhist country, a conservative mandarin in a region seething with revolution. Yet the Americans thought he would do just fine. After all, he had been promoted and recommended by Cardinal Spellman, hustled from office to office in Washington to meet the few men in America who knew anything at all about Vietnam. For a while he served Washington’s interests well, refusing to honor the Geneva agreements by taking part in the 1956 elections, which would have unified Vietnam. The reason was simple: in a free election, Ho Chi Minh would have won. And in an American election year, neither John Foster Dulles nor Dwight Eisenhower was prepared to let a Communist come to power in a free election. So Diem built his army, expanded his corps of American advisers, took his American millions. The Communists went back to the hills.

But Diem was remote and mystical. The regime was soon controlled by Diem’s sinister brother, Nhu, a corrupt drug addict, and Diem’s snarling sister-in-law, Madame Nhu. Non-Communist opponents were killed or jailed; puritanical laws were clamped on the population; the South Vietnamese Army — the ARVN — was wormy with thievery and paranoia. And in the early sixties the Vietcong began to fight, and to win. By the time Diem and Nhu were assassinated in a coup on November 1, 1963, and Madame Nhu had departed for exile, the war was almost lost. The Americans came piling in like the cavalry riding to the rescue. Right into the quagmire.