The POW films gave imaginary veterans an opportunity to avenge their victimization. Rambo is the ultimate victim-hero. In First Blood, the former Green Beret and Vietnam veteran arrives on foot in a small mountain town in the Pacific Northwest. He is there to track down an old army buddy, the only other survivor of Rambo’s Special Forces team. The news is bad. His friend has died of cancer, Rambo learns from the African American mother. Agent Orange had “cut him down to nothing.” Rambo walks to a nearby town. He’s wearing an army jacket with an American flag sewn on his right breast. The local sheriff pulls up and warns him that his long hair and the flag decal are “asking for trouble.”
Rambo did nothing wrong, but the sheriff wants him gone. When Rambo refuses, he’s arrested and abused—a “smart-ass drifter” who “smells like an animal.” The local cops treat him as if he were a hippie civil rights activist in the worst southern jail of the 1960s. In fact, the most sadistic of the cops speaks with a vaguely southern accent and oversees the “cleaning” of Rambo with a fire hose not unlike the ones used against the heroes of the civil rights movement. The water slams Rambo against the wall. Then the cops try to shave him by force.
That’s when Rambo flashes back to his 1971 imprisonment in Vietnam. We see him strung up—Christ-like—on a bamboo cross. A Vietnamese torturer uses a long knife to cut a bloody line across Rambo’s chest. Rambo’s entire torso, front and back, carries the scars of his wartime victimization. He is tortured again in Rambo II, when he is briefly imprisoned in postwar Vietnam while trying to liberate American POWs. This time, the torturers are Soviet officers, a fictional touch suggesting that America’s real enemy in Vietnam had always been the most powerful Communists in the world. The Soviets have Rambo tied to a wired spring mattress and subject him to electric shocks.
All sides in the Vietnam War tortured prisoners, but only the American side is known to have used electric shock. American troops called those sessions the Bell Telephone Hour, a double pun referring to an old TV show sponsored by the phone company and the instrument of torture—a standard military field phone. Wires were connected from the phone to a prisoner’s genitalia or tongue, and the phone was cranked to produce a powerful shock. The POW films expunge memories of American brutality in Vietnam and replace them entirely with images of enemy sadism.
Rambo escapes from his Soviet torturers just as he escapes from the American jail in First Blood. Then it is war. Rambo becomes a magically skillful guerrilla warrior. He hides himself in leaves, mud, water, caves—all of nature—only to leap out in horrible and unexpected surprise to wreak vengeance on his attackers. In First Blood, he lures a huge force of National Guardsmen out into the wilderness. They are noisy, overarmed, inept, and undisciplined; he is stealthy, surgical, and relentless. When the sheriff learns that Rambo is a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, he does not back off: “I’m going to pin that Medal of Honor on his liver.” The violence escalates and Rambo eventually blows up most of the town.
For all the commercial success of the movies, actual Vietnam veterans found little in Rambo to admire. He vivified every negative stereotype imaginable—vet as psycho, vet as killer, vet as outcast, vet as victim. Nothing in these films did justice to the complexity of the war or those who fought it. The fact that actor Sly Stallone had evaded the real Vietnam War in the 1960s only made his one-man efforts to redeem and refight the war in the 1980s all the more galling.
Fictional POW rescuers like Stallone and Chuck Norris were part of a new generation of action stars whose muscles dwarfed those of earlier Hollywood he-men. They played characters who seemed obsessed with rescuing American manhood. Masculinity was apparently in such peril it required heroes who looked like they had sprung from the pages of a comic book. The movie posters of Stallone and Norris show them with sweat glistening from their gigantic pectoral muscles and supersized machine guns rising from their crotches.
These films contributed to the nasty backlash against feminism in the 1980s. Yet they also exposed a vision of masculinity that was fragile and defensive—making it all the more volatile and scary. Underneath the gaudy displays of pumped-up power, these characters are vulnerable, bitter, and psychologically brittle. They view themselves as scorned and rejected victims. Rambo cannot even enjoy his moment of greatest triumph. After commandeering an enemy helicopter and filling it with POWs, he destroys a far more powerful Soviet gunship and flies the captives to safety. But Rambo never even smiles. When his commander tells him he has earned a second Medal of Honor, Rambo sneers, “Give it to them [the POWs]. They deserve it more.”
Rambo’s comment epitomizes the post-Vietnam idea that victimized survivors are especially heroic. But it also draws attention to Rambo’s own suffering—clearly no award can compensate for the nation’s betrayal of his patriotism and sacrifice. “What is it you want?” asks his puzzled commander. Rambo says he wants what all soldiers and veterans want: “For the country to love us as much as we love the country.” Then he turns his back and walks toward the horizon, forever alone.
The end of First Blood is even bleaker. After blowing up the town, Rambo’s former commander tries to talk him down: “It’s over, Johnny. It’s over.”
“Nothing is over!” Rambo shouts. “Nothing! You don’t just turn it off. It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. . . . Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spittin’. . . . Who are they to protest me, huh?. . . . For me this life is nothing. . . . Back there I could fly a gunship. I could drive a tank. I was in charge of a million dollars’ worth of equipment. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars.” Rambo is reduced to tears, led away to jail with his commander’s huge topcoat draped over his shoulders, looking shrunken and defeated.
The myth of abandoned POWs reinforced the powerful 1980s idea that the Vietnam War was an American tragedy that victimized our troops, our pride, and our national identity. The destruction of Vietnam was supplanted by American suffering. Even the Vietnamese who had fought on the American side were mostly ignored. The names of their dead did not appear on Vietnam veterans memorials. Nor was there much national concern for the hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese held in postwar “re-education” camps. The real postwar POWs were not former American bomber pilots withering away in bamboo cages, but Vietnamese who had served in the South Vietnamese military or worked for the American-backed government. They were the “live” POWs held in concentration camps behind barbed wire. They were the prisoners subjected to forced labor, interrogation, and political indoctrination. Rambo never rescued them.
Also largely ignored were the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled postwar Vietnam on boats. The lucky ones ended up in refugee camps where they might have to live in shantytowns for years before a host country granted them admission. Tens of thousands did not even make it to refugee camps. They died at sea—victims of drowning, exposure, dehydration, starvation, or murderous pirates. At least as many Vietnamese died fleeing their country after the war as Americans died fighting it.
From all of this wreckage, you might have thought it impossible to rebuild American pride. It turned out to be remarkably easy.
9
“The Pride Is Back”
ON A SEPTEMBER night in 1984, conservative columnist and TV pundit George Will ventured out to see the thirty-five-year-old rock phenom whose latest album had already sold five million copies. The concertgoer wore his trademark bow tie and a double-breasted blazer. With his hair parted to one side with razorlike precision, Will jammed cotton in his ears and settled in alongside twenty thousand adoring fans of Bruce Springsteen. Like an anthropologist inspecting a foreign culture, he made field notes.
Good news, Will reported. This alien world turned out to be as American as apple pie. First he noticed that Springsteen was all man, “not a smidgen of androgyny. . . . Rocketing around the stage in a T-shirt and headband,” he looks like “Robert De Niro in th
e combat scenes of The Deer Hunter.” Despite the possible presence of drugs (“I do not even know what marijuana smoke smells like”), Will found himself “surrounded by orderly young adults earnestly—and correctly—insisting that Springsteen is a wholesome cultural portent.” As usual, he performed for almost four hours, “vivid proof that the work ethic is alive and well.” If all Americans “made their products with as much energy and confidence” we wouldn’t have to worry about foreign competition.
George Will concluded that Springsteen was an upbeat patriot, not a “whiner. . . . I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings about hard times . . . and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’”
On one level, Will had a point. There was a lot of flag-waving at American arenas and concert halls during the Born in the U.S.A. Tour. Springsteen himself performed the song in front of a massive American flag and when he came to the famous chorus—“Born in the U.S.A.!!”—the band’s volume was deafening and a sea of fists thrust to the sky in sync with “the Boss,” whose muscles rippled from two years of strenuous bodybuilding.
So it isn’t surprising that observers might identify Springsteen with a particular form of American pride and patriotism. The astonishing part is George Will’s assumption that the rock star might agree to a joint campaign appearance with the conservative Republican president Ronald Reagan. Springsteen was a famous champion of working-class victims of deindustrialization, corporate flight, deregulation, and union busting. Reagan’s first-term policies had contributed to all of those blows to the economic well-being of American workers. When the president’s reelection team took Will’s advice and called Springsteen’s booking agent, they were politely rejected.
But that did not stop Reagan from invoking Springsteen’s name at a campaign appearance in Hammonton, New Jersey. First he praised the audience for being the kind of Americans who “didn’t come asking for welfare or special treatment.” Then he moved to the heart of his standard stump speech: “I think there’s a new feeling of patriotism in our land, a recognition that by any standard America is a decent and generous place, a force for good in the world. And I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of hearing people run her down.” Then, a few beats later: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts. It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire—New Jersey’s own, Bruce Springsteen.”
Springsteen felt compelled to respond. At a concert in Pittsburgh, he told the crowd, “The President was mentioning my name the other day and I kind of got to wondering what his favorite album musta been. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.” With that, Springsteen launched into “Johnny 99,” a song about an autoworker who lost his job when the Ford plant in Mahwah, New Jersey, closed. Johnny got drunk, shot a night clerk, and was given a ninety-nine-year sentence. Nebraska, Springsteen’s 1982 solo acoustic album, is full of bleak and haunting songs about people with debts “no honest man can pay,” who are down to their “last prayer.” It’s about a world divided between “winners and losers,” with hilltop mansions surrounded by “steel gates” and silent mill towns below; a mean world of scarce and unrewarded work, of unatoned sins and “lost souls,” where a used-car salesman stares at the hands of a man who “sweats the same job from mornin’ to morn.” Reagan’s sentimental “message of hope” is nowhere to be found, only the plaintive cry to “deliver me from nowhere” and the stubborn persistence of people determined to find a “reason to believe” even when it’s as hopeless as trying to prod a dead dog to life with a stick.
Nothing could be less like the vision of the country presented by Reagan’s 1984 campaign commercial, “Morning in America.” You see gauzy feel-good images of a fishing boat at dawn; a montage of lively people heading off to work in suburbs, in cities, and on farms; a radiant bride embracing an elderly woman; and the reverent raising of American flags. Over it all you hear a deep, soft voice calmly saying: “It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history . . . more people are buying new homes and our new families can have confidence in the future. America today is prouder, and stronger, and better.”
While no one could confuse Nebraska and “Morning in America,” many listeners have regarded Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a kind of national anthem more than a protest song. It has been the sound track to countless Fourth of July picnics and patriotic occasions. If you pay attention only to the chorus, “Born in the U.S.A.,” it can be heard as a resounding affirmation of national pride. “I think people have a need to feel good about the country they live in,” Springsteen told Rolling Stone. But that “need—which is a good thing—is getting manipulated and exploited. You see the Reagan reelection ads on TV—you know, ‘It’s morning in America’—and you say, ‘Well, it’s not morning in Pittsburgh.’”
Springsteen originally recorded “Born in the U.S.A.” in 1982 as a solo acoustic ballad. This minor-key version is unambiguously grim. But he changed his mind, choosing instead to do a hard-rocking version that created a dramatic tension between the chorus and the anguishing story of an unemployed Vietnam veteran.
In the pounding rock version, Springsteen virtually screams the lyrics: “Born down in a dead man’s town / The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.” Then he shifts to the second person, from “I” to “you,” inviting a broader identification with people who endure such harsh circumstances: “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much / Till you spend half your life just covering up.” It is hard to imagine a more devastating four-line biography of a working-class American. This beaten “dog” has endured so many blows his ingrained reflex is to protect himself against anticipated assaults and to disguise the psychological damage he has suffered. Survival requires “covering up.” These lyrics are about suffering and shame, not pride and hope.
But then comes the driving chorus: “BORN IN THE U.S.A!!” Springsteen’s voice is raspy, even anguished, but the instruments are all pleasure—bright chords and explosive snares. How could there be pain in these powerful birthright declarations carried on a wall of sound that makes people want to thrust their fists into the air?
We move back to the story: “Got in a little hometown jam / So they put a rifle in my hand / Sent me off to a foreign land / To go and kill the yellow man.” For this soldier, military service did not spring from idealism or patriotism or even a John Wayne fantasy of heroism. It was a punishment. Like thousands of Vietnam-era adolescents, Springsteen’s narrator was probably hauled before a judge after breaking the law (a “hometown jam”) and told that he could either do time in jail or do time in the military. So off he went, not compelled by an inspiring mission, but simply ordered to kill Asians.
After another chorus (“BORN IN THE U.S.A.!!”), the veteran returns to his birthplace in industrial America. “Come back home to the refinery / Hiring man said, ‘Son, if it was up to me’ / Went down to see my V.A. man / He said, ‘Son, don’t you understand.’” Homecoming offers a double rejection. The nation’s once mighty economy has no job for this veteran, and the Veterans Administration—the government agency that once oversaw one of the most generous social programs in American history (the GI Bill of 1944)—is equally unhelpful. Corporate America and the government had turned their backs.
This is a song about betrayal and alienation. The only thing left for this lost and homeless veteran is to proclaim his national identity. His proclamations are bitter reminders of broken promises, not triumphant affirmations. They may reflect a defiant never-surrender attitude, but they do not celebrate the nation’s most powerful institutions. According to Springsteen, the narrator of “Born in the U.S.A.” wants to “strip away that mythic America which was Reagan’s
image. . . . He wants to find something real, and connecting. He’s looking for a home in his country.”
Underneath the ritualistic flag-waving of post-Vietnam America, Springsteen’s music identifies the persistent suffering among millions of citizens struggling, and often failing, to gain basic economic security. The country seemed desperate for heroes and a renewal of national pride even as its industrial base was in severe decline and the lives of workers were ever more precarious. Local attachments and identities were frayed and vulnerable. That was the America to which so many Vietnam veterans returned. “Born in the U.S.A.” concludes with this: “I’m ten years burning down the road / Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”
Yet those hard realities coexisted with a powerful new strain of nationalism that depended, in part, on changing the everyday meaning of “Vietnam.” Once associated almost entirely with horrible waste and violence, rancorous debates and divisions, defeat and disillusionment, it was now being offered as a synonym for service and sacrifice. As with so much else in 1980s political culture, President Reagan set the tone. In 1981, he became the first president to utter the word “Vietnam” in an inaugural address. No wartime president could bring himself—in that most important of speeches—even to name the place where millions were dying. Reagan invoked Vietnam not to invite a reckoning with the war’s troubling history, but to cleanse it of its most toxic associations. He did it with the lightest possible touch. He simply attached Vietnam to a long tradition of heroic military service, yet one more place where brave Americans had died for their country—“Belleau Wood, the Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.” Reagan wrapped all American wars, and all the American soldiers who had died in those wars, in a single flag of patriotism and sacrifice. “A place called Vietnam” was thus as hallowed as all the other sites of American heroism. There was no need to question the righteousness or consequences of any specific war.
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 31