Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  But when it was over at last, it seemed like some peculiar television series that had been canceled. Some of us had hoped that defeat would create a healthy national skepticism, a communal refusal ever again to take innocently the sermons of our leaders. We would be a nation of adults, at last, having learned what Europeans had learned long ago: that defeat is the great teacher, that there are limits to power, that slogans are no substitute for thinking.

  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.

  Diem and Nhu and the Dragon Lady are forgotten now, their faces blurred by time. Forgotten too is all the optimistic gush that rolled out of the typewriters of Saigon flacks, the nonsense about strategic hamlets, electronic fences, Special Forces A-Teams, the C.I.D.G., the winning of hearts and minds — all those lights at the end of all those tunnels. A billion words must have issued from the collective mouths of official spokesmen; the men in the black pajamas, however, kept coming down those trails to fight. Who now remembers the hundreds of thousands of words that dropped from the lips of Sir Robert Thompson, who periodically retailed his wisdom to the gullible Americans? He had had a part in the British victory over the Malayan insurgents; that made him an expert. So the Americans listened, while Thompson declared himself a clear-and-hold man rather than a search-and-destroy man, and none of it mattered, because neither strategy worked. In offices in Washington and Saigon, the slick charts looked persuasive; on the field of battle, the Communists were absorbing the most horrendous punishment, and winning.

  Only a handful of Americans can remember when M.A.A.G. changed its name to M.A.C.V., or when Chase Manhattan opened its Saigon office, or how many tons of Coca-Cola were unloaded at Cam Ranh Bay. Such details exist in the dusty files of the outfits that managed the war, but they don’t, of course, matter anymore. Other details should. How many remember that the first American killed in Vietnam was Specialist Fourth Class James T. Davis, of Livingston, Tennessee? He died in an ambush on December 22, 1961, just outside Due Hoa, twelve miles from Saigon. The last to die were Marine Corporals Charles McMahon, Jr., twenty-two, of Woburn, Massachusetts, and Darwin Judge, nineteen, of Marshalltown, Iowa. They perished under a North Vietnamese artillery barrage that was laid upon Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29, 1975, the day before the war ended. Their bodies, forgotten in the panic of evacuation, were not brought home until the following March. Their families remember, but almost nobody else in America knows their names. They are as forgotten as the almost 2.5 million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians who died between 1961 and 1975.

  Everybody who went to Vietnam carries his or her own version of the war. Only 10 percent engaged in combat; the American elephant, pursuing the Vietnamese grasshopper, was extraordinarily heavy with logistical support. Tours were for a single year, so a man who fought through the 1968 Tet offensive would remember one war, a man who was there in 1971 another. Some cooked eggs in mess halls; others waded through muck in the swamps.

  All the reporters remember the Five O’Clock Follies, held downtown in the old Rex Theater under the auspices of JUSPAO (Joint United States Public Affairs Office). These daily briefings, held by the men who clerked the war, were usually a bizarre amalgam of kill ratios, body counts, incident counts, weapons recovered. The flacks were neat, clean, invariably crew-cut, and optimism was the order of the day. Occasionally a visiting politician or labor leader would be introduced, after seventy-two hours in the country, to serve up the official line. The message was understood: surely the richest country on earth, the world’s most powerful military machine, would eventually triumph over these badly equipped, badly fed little Orientals. We had technology. We had B-52S and patrol boats and electronic sensors and fighter planes and aircraft carriers and money, endless billions of dollars. Of course we would win. Above all, we would win because we were right. We would roll back the Communist tide.

  Out in the field, the grunts who were fighting one of the best-motivated armies in history knew better. The grunts always knew better.

  In Saigon, you didn’t see the infantry of either side. The great early cliché of the war was the irony of sitting in the bar on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel, sipping a vodka and tonic, watching artillery light up the night sky only a dozen miles away. Saigon calls up other memories as well, among those who paid rent there long ago: the zigzagging geometries of traffic, the pedicabs, motorbikes, bicycles, and battered cars coughing up filthy blue exha
ust fumes; the damp smell of much handled piasters; the bars of Tu Do Street, not much different from those frequented by the French when the street was the rue Catinat (so carefully described by Graham Greene in The Quiet American, that chillingly prophetic novel, which was ignored by the men who made policy). The whores and bar girls were everywhere, citizens of the country of money; you numbah one, he num-bah ten, you like Saigon tea? The old whorehouses of the French epoch were almost all gone by the time the Americans arrived, banished by the puritanical Diem; the old-timers talked with fondness of mirrored walls and ceilings, silky thighs, elegant meals, opium in ivory pipes, mauve dawns.

  That was not the American epoch. There were men who loved women in that country, and many who learned to love the country itself, but you. could never love Tu Do Street, the lithe whispering whores in Mimi’s Bar, the women with the enameled faces whose eyes said nothing. They too were casualties of the war, stunned out of feeling, and their sisters could be found all over the country, wherever young Americans were stationed in large numbers. They lived in the half-dark of the bars, where the music of Aretha Franklin and the Doors and the Stones pounded from the jukeboxes, where phrases were dropped, money was exchanged, and men were led upstairs, or into ambushes. The young Vietnamese men, eyes glittery with hatred, watched the Americans parade their purchased ladies along the avenues, where tamarind trees were dying from the exhaust fumes, and sometimes they reached out and slashed an American belly before vanishing into the crowds. Packs of small children roamed too, forcing collisions, slicing at pockets for wallets, flipping watches off the wrists of drunks. In Saigon, the Americans were far from the war, but living in its very heart.

  There were some who came to love the very pain of Vietnam, the way lovers surrender to the fierce ache that makes them feel most truly alive. Reporters, spooks, bureaucrats, officers, A.I.D. officials, missionaries — they kept returning, as if convinced that if they made one final desperate attempt Vietnam would love them back. Vietnam never did. Those Americans wanted an affair; most had to settle for a heartless fuck.

  There is a widely held theory that television and a free press lost the war. Americans at home, the theory goes, could not bear the sight of all those wounded boys, crying for medics on the far side of the earth, and eventually the people rebelled and told the statesmen to bring the boys home. The truth is that, even in this living-room war, Americans saw a false, sanitized version of the struggle. There were no cameras around to see the soldiers who, after 1970, began shooting up with bachbien, which is what the Vietnamese called heroin; no cameras to show ARVN officers collecting their profits from the filthy trade. Cameras couldn’t transmit the smells of Vietnam: the coppery smell of fresh blood, the farting and gurgling of a mortally wounded boy, the sweet odor of decaying bodies, a week after a firefight, putrefying under the punishing sky. There were sluggish streams in country that gave off the stinking odor of a brown, fetid scum produced by upstream blood. The smells were never to be forgotten. Nor were the sights. In field hospitals you could see young men, only months away from ball fields and Saturday-night dates, their bodies ruptured, full of morphine, skin blistered, legs or arms or eyes gone; they seldom made the seven o’clock news. And the cameras couldn’t capture the terror of a man cut off from his unit, unavoidably left on the field of fire, in the night that belonged to the Vietcong, his body no longer obeying his mind, his words dropping like obscene prayers: oh mama, oh fucking jesus mama, oh jesus fucking christ, oh mama, oh. The cameramen were extraordinarily brave; they saw more combat than any general, more in a day than any of the best and the brightest back in Washington would ever see; but the true televised history of Vietnam was in the outtakes, those moments, that footage, deemed too obscene to be shown to Americans or the rest of the world.

  Such details are forgotten now in what passes for public discourse on the war. That is understandable, of course; no nation can dwell forever on pain and defeat. But it remains an astonishing fact that so little was learned from the long, heartbreaking experience.

  There were many valuable lessons to be learned. For instance, that technology alone cannot beat motivated infantry, a lesson that Iraq is now learning in its war with Iran. Perhaps more important, statesmen should have learned that if there is a chance to end a conflict with a deal, take the deal, no matter how imperfect (Diem turned down a 1962 offer from the Vietcong to lay down arms and join a coalition government; the Americans turned down a similar deal the following year). Our leaders should have learned to avoid, if possible, taking sides in a civil war; any city cop will tell you that he would rather face a professional murderer than intervene in a domestic dispute. We should have learned that a great nation must never enter a war unless the goals are absolutely clear, and agreed upon by a majority of citizens; then you formally declare war, instead of sliding into it a foot at a time.

  Vietnam should have taught us that mindless anti-Communism is not a cause worth killing or dying for, in a world in which Communism is hardly a monolithic force. Vietnam should have taught us that nationalism, with its engines of independence and self-determination, is a more powerful force by far than Marxism, and must be understood and respected. We should have learned that in a democracy such as ours, lying is fatal, whether to the press or to the people or to ourselves. We should have learned that we can’t ever talk in the flowery pieties of democracy and freedom while supporting a right-wing military dictatorship. As citizens, we should have learned never again to place our trust in princes, or in abstraction, and never to entrust the war-making decisions to men who have not directly experienced combat.

  Above all, Americans should have learned that before they go barging into some remote place in the world they must study its history. In Vietnam, the Americans were deep into the swamp before they started reading Joseph Buttinger, Bernard Fall, the accounts of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the thousand-year story of the tenacious Vietnamese struggle for independence from China. Discovering these things after the commitment was made led to folly, pain, death, and tragedy. Yet in Lebanon and Central America, less than ten years after Vietnam, the old mistakes are general once more; ignorance is apparently invincible, the American capacity for human folly without limit.

  There is no excuse for this anymore, of course. The literature on Vietnam grows daily, filling the shelves of libraries and bookstores. The complete story of the war remains elusive, to be sure, because historians and journalists still have little access to the other side, to the men and women of Vietnam, North and South, who endured so much misery and pain for so many years. Until the Vietnamese war in Cambodia ends, until the United States, with the good grace of a defeated prizefighter, at last offers the hand of friendship to the people who won, we won’t know it all. We don’t even know all of the American part of the tragic tale. We’ll be learning about Vietnam for the rest of our lives.

  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’Brie
n’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.