I am reading The Perfect War. On Amazon they hate it and love it. Vets seem to have dismissed it for credulous, shallow research. Academics were grateful that one of their own stuck his neck out (read "put his career and reputation, both of which were on the short side, up against the wall of silence that met the real history of our engagement with Viet Nam.)
Intuitively I agreed with the title when I found the book in a charity store -- Vietnam was a perfect war. I bought it without reading past the subtitle: "Technowar in Vietnam." It perfected the insanity, the hubris, the tragedy, the wanton destruction, the political impotence, the cultural suicide of all wars and wrapped it in a bright shiny ribbon. Iraq and Afghanistan are roadshow shadows of the real Show of the Century. Vietnam was the longest running war in American history by any measure. It only counted 55,000 dead, but negatively impacted half a million American military and an entire generation of civilians. It was the source of more continuous hours of prime time news coverage than any other war, or news event, or political career, or business or health or any other issue in American life in the last 40 years. It could not have been improved on, as wars go.
A friend of mine who won a purple heart in Nam said the biggest problem for vets, 40 years later, is that they loved and hated the war. And nothing helps them sort it out. I suppose a corrollary is that some who only hated the war, and a few who only loved it, had fewer problems readjusting to life in the world again. But the vast majority of those who served, particularly in combat, came away from the experience with new parts bolted on to their brains, hearts, and memories. Inhuman, in some respects, if you consider "human" to fit within the bounds of civilized values.
I don't, myself.
I think any person is candidate for human status, and humane treatment. Ah, I guess my baptism is showing.
But reading the lucid authoritative and insightful first pages of this book disinters (yes, brings up out of the grave) a growing obsession with Vietnam that peaked for me about 18 months ago, and which I had to bury for a long time.
I did not serve in Viet Nam. But I feel as though I have served the war in Viet Nam throughout my adult life. I call it the Lemma. Not "dilemma" which implies a twofold nature, a conundrum of choice. Lemma. Single. And the name for an ancient shape which is used in one context to denote infinity, another context to denote the path of the sun on the meridian of the International Dateline on globes in schools and libraries around the world.
The single lemma which contains all others. It is a shape like an airplane propeller, or the figure eight. You can start anywhere on the outline and if you move far enough you will have changed direction twice, crossed the center once, which means you will have gone in every direction and taken all sides of the issue represented by the Lemma. Death, evil, virtue, life, creation, destruction. Add Man, Woman, and Infinity and you almost have the rebus of the old television show introduced by Sam Jaffee: Ben Casey, M.D. -- every week during the beginning of Viet Nam's incursion into the American Living Room, Bedroom, and funeral parlor. And from there back out to the baptismal fonts and treatment centers of a staggered nation. In and out. Back and forth. Around and around, but all sides and every direction of every issue.
How does the lemma work as, lets say, the symbol of the legacy of Viet Nam? It isn't a cross carrying an individual conscience to the limit of human sacrifice. It isn't an eye of horus, branding the aeons with the ominous promise of mysteries reserved for a hierophantic caste. It isn't a rose, flesh and generous, ranging from prim to wanton in its phases but always joining the mind to the body indelibly, in time.
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