Download PDF of this full issue: v7n4.pdf (8.4 MB)

Books On The War Revise History: Rich Get Off Hook

By Pete Zastrow

During the Vietnam War there were almost no books, plays or movies which dramatized the war. Although in past wars a flood of war adventure literature went hand in hand with the fighting, the Vietnam War didn't produce much more than the farce "Green Berets" which received the contempt it deserved from millions of Americans for whom some of the realities of the war appeared each night on the TV news.

Now, two years after the Indochinese won the war, the Vietnam war is front-page literary news. A flurry of books--Ron Kovic's Born on the 4th of July, Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers, and Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War--climb on the best sellers lists; major movies with name stars will hit the screen in the next few months.

The books are a new breed; no longer are they glorifying American fighting forces and their "cause" as such books have in the past. Instead, both Winners and Losers and A Rumor of War are full of glimpses of what it was like to fight the war and why US troops found themselves 10,000 miles from home. But despite the often striking truths in the books, neither author draws together the pieces into a real conclusion about the nature of the Vietnam War. Instead, they play into the overall propaganda about the war being pushed on us by the class that rules this country.

"Healing the wounds" of Vietnam, putting the war behind us, are favorite phrases of Jimmy Carter. As front man for the rich class, Carter has played well the role of trying to get the American people to forget the war and forget the lessons which the war taught: that a small country with a clear political determination to win can defeat superpower technology, that a mass movement like the anti-war movement in this country can help to force the government to end their aggressive war, that millions of sons of working people are sent off to fight a war for the profits of the rich.

But the memory of Vietnam will not disappear; and so the mouthpieces of the rich are willing to push books or movies which draw the kinds of conclusions they want about US involvement in Southeast Asia and the resulting uproar here at home.

And that is what's happening with the books by Gloria Emerson, foreign correspondent for the New York Times during the Vietnam War, and Philip Caputo, foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

Winners and Losers is a collection of interviews with people whose lives were affected by the war--everyone from a National Liberation Front soldier, a prisoner in one of Saigon's notorious prisons, anti-war activists in the Us, Vietnam vets, families of resisters, to people who whole-heartedly support the Us involvement in Indochina. During the war Emerson often played an important part as an anti-war writer--I watched some of the brass in the 1st Air Cav turn somersaults in panic at the thought of her arriving in the area since she wanted to talk to the grunts rather than the officers and was not bought off with special favors as easily as other correspondents. Her articles about the tiger cages on Con Son Island provided one more expose of the brutality of Saigon's puppet government, and the involvement of US business in profiting from these instruments of torture.

But this book doesn't make it. Inside the dozens of interviews and comments are some important ideas, as when a Vietnamese patriot says, "Much has been said about this war's being a mistake as though it were correctable. It is not; it is part of a larger pattern....After 1945 one type of colonialism...was replaced by a new form of domination maintained by large countries with extensive resources, territories and populations operating through foreign military and economic aid programs....We have to watch these superpowers."

But in the choice of individual interviews and in the author's comments, there is a subtle but dominating message--one that reads out to the same message the government is putting forward. For instance, Emerson quotes an anti-war New York suburbanite as saying, "The one thing that's still waling from the sixties is the ecology movement....They can't knock it down or kill it."

Or her comments on VVAW; after writing about the impact of Operation Dewey Canyon III (the 1971 action where VVAW members threw back their war medals in Washington) she summarizes the state of the organization saying, "It took a while for VVAW to die..." Attempts to declare VVAW dead in the past, either by journalists or the government have been notably unsuccessful.

The war is over, Emerson's message goes, and with it all the struggle against a system where the rich use us to fight there wars. There are no interviews with people who fought against the war, learned the nature of the imperialist system, and continue to battle to change that system. And you can search her book in vain to find more than a memory of struggle--there is nothing which points toward the future.

Caputo's book comes from a different direction, though the final conclusion is much the same. Caputo was a young lieutenant with the first full Marine Brigade to be sent to Vietnam and was a part of the change from simply guarding the perimeter at Da Nang (so the ARVN could fight the war) to active US military operations (for instance when various ARVN factions were fighting each other in Da Nang and leaving all the operations against the NLF to the Americans).

There are a vivid series of jolts to the memory of anyone who fought in Vietnam; Caputo captures much of the chaos and sense of futility which was a big part of Vietnam combat. Sent to the rear after a couple of months in the field, Caputo was given the job of casualty reporting, watching his friends come in on stretchers or in body bags. No longer gung ho about fighting for "democracy," he nevertheless volunteered to go back to the field out of frustration and a sense of obligation to his friends who were still there. In his own private act of resistance he refuses orders for ceremonial parades; he tries to convince incoming troops of what he has learned during the war.

But finally, the book says that you can't fight the system. In a brief postscript Caputo talks about his years after he got out of the Marines; "I had drifted into the anti-war movement," he writes, "though I was never passionately involved in it. I eventually joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but my most explicit gesture of protest was made in 1970 when I mailed my campaign ribbons to President Nixon....I though, naively, that such a personal, individual act would have more effect than mass marches....(But) my grand gesture of personal protest had been futile, as futile as the war itself."

"This book ought not be regarded as a protest," Caputo writes; "Protest arises from a belief that one can change things or influence events. I am not egotistical enough to believe I can. Besides, it no longer seems necessary to register an objection to the war, because the war is over....(The book) might, perhaps prevent the next generation from being crucified in the next war. But I don't think so."

Though he refuses to draw the conclusion, Caputo's book contradicts his own sense of futility. The war in Indochina ended not because the corporate powers and political bigwigs who sent us off to fight wanted the war to end, but because they had to end it: the NLF and the North Vietnamese, knowing that it is not only possible but necessary to "influence events," won the war, and millions of Americans in the streets, as well as thousands of GIs resisting the war inside the military, helped force the US government to get out of Indochina.

There will be more books, more movies about Vietnam as this country's rulers, through whatever vehicle they can, try to put out their views of what the war meant. Too many people know enough about the war for them to try to get over with glorifying the US role in Indochina. Instead, they will try to distort and pervert the lessons, hoping to quench the sparks which resistance to that war ignited. But the fires of struggle continue to burn.

(This review was written by a member of the VVAW National Office who served as an infantry captain in Vietnam & as Information Officer for the 2nd Brigade, 1st Air Cav at Quon Loi, Lai Khe, and Song Be, Vietnam.)