Piecework

But the interim texts of the war are there for this generation of politicians, military men, and ordinary citizens to examine, brood upon, and absorb. In the Pentagon Papers, we can see the instinct for bureaucratic self-deception, the presentation of false options, the insistence on illusion in the face of the facts. We can understand the difference between genuine national pride and a self-centered national vanity when we read the memoirs of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. We can experience the fury, pain, and craziness of combat in Michael Herr’s Dispatches, in Mark Baker’s Nam, in Wallace Terry’s Bloods. The works of Frances FitzGerald and Jonathan Schell show with agonizing clarity what the war did to the ordinary Vietnamese, living in those poor villages that got in the way of the juggernaut. From Gloria Emerson’s Winners and Losers to Joe Klein’s Payback, we’ve had books that explored the shattering effect of the war on the generation that fought it. And there is a huge shelf of books about the way the war changed America itself, all those books about the sixties. All are connected: the multipart PBS series, the Stanley Karnow history, the Time-Life volumes. And the novels: Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, John M. Del Vecchio’s The 13th Valley. The war hangs over all the novels of Ward Just, and it is the offstage presence in Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams. The movies have been less successful — Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and all those films about daring missions to rescue M.I.A.’s still held by the Dirty Commies. Film is almost too literal to capture Vietnam; the truth of the war was internalized, mythic, surrealistic, allusive; its darkest furies, deepest grief, and most brutal injuries could not be photographed. This war belongs to the printed page.

The extraordinary thing is that the men who make the hard decisions in government don’t seem to have read a sentence of the literature, or to have applied the lessons to the present world. The tangled, hurting history of Nicaragua is there to be discovered, its culture and myths can be examined; but policy is still determined on the basis of the old 1950s East-West quarrel. If the hard men in the Kremlin had read carefully the story of the American adventure in Vietnam, they might have paused before blundering murderously into Afghanistan. Those statesmen who refuse to allow the rebels into a coalition government in El Salvador should examine the lost diplomatic opportunities in Vietnam.

Last year, in Nicaragua, I thought a lot about Vietnam. There were no exact analogies, of course, but in the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, I remembered walking through the same kind of lobby in Saigon, talking to correspondents fresh from the fields of battle, exchanging the small talk of war. Late at night, I recalled the faces of soldiers I’d met long ago, marines in the hills and jungles of I Corps, grunts traveling through the treacherous passes around Bong Son.

Talk about Vietnam to old soldiers, meet an old reporter, and they’ll remember another thing: the beauty of the place. One afternoon, in the lovely hills of Nicaragua, where the contras now roam, I remembered an afternoon near Dalat when a group of us saw a flock of birds, white against the bottle-green hills, move slowly to the north. They looked like doves, and we laughed at the obvious symbolism and moved on. It’s difficult to explain to people how beautiful napalm can look, scudding in orange flames across a dark hillside. Seen from a helicopter, the natural green feminine beauty of Vietnam was forever underlined by man-made damage; those blue and brown rain-filled pools had been made by B-52S; those ghastly dead forests, as skeletal as Giacometti figures, were created by Agent Orange. In the night, you could hear hot wind blowing through the trees, as sibilant as Asia, a wind with its own language, its own sound, atonal; that was Vietnam too.