(9 of 11)
"People can now see the comic pathos of Viet Nam," says Clark. "They would not have laughed five years ago. It would have been like going to a funeral and laughing." For a long time, Clark could not joke about Viet Nam. As a second lieutenant in the infantry, he "found war" in 1971, during the 72-day incursion into Laos known as Dewey Canyon II. Of the 35 men who set out with him in his platoon, only eleven returned. Clark later went through the familiar agony of nightmares and flashbacks. "There were times when I was hell to live with," he recalls. "In 1975, when they had all those TV specials on Viet Nam, they would show coffins with flags draped on them. I knew people in those coffins, and I would just cry."
Viet Nam brought on a cultural civil war in the U.S.—a deep and basic fracture. The conflict within the immense baby-boom generation—the Americans who came of age just in time for Viet Nam —almost amounted to this century's equivalent of the War Between the States. But now, here and there, are signs that the terrible poisons and destructive intractabilities of the time are yielding to some charity and acceptance. Many antiwar activists are learning a certain sympathy for the Viet Nam veterans that they never displayed before. Says Journalist Doug Kamholz, an antiwar radical in the '60s: "I have been feeling guilty about blaming the war on the warriors. I never yelled 'baby killer,' but I didn't oppose it either. It was a moral and political mistake for the antiwar movement not to see the difference. I hope it's not too late."
One veteran who is trying to reconcile those who served and those who did not is James Webb. A much decorated, twice-wounded Annapolis graduate who led a company of Marines in Viet Nam, Webb recently resigned as minority counsel to the House Veterans' Affairs Committee to devote full time to writing. "We're going to lead this country side by side," Webb says of those converging constituencies.
"We're going to have to resolve this. The easiest way is for people who didn't serve in those years to come off this pretentiousness of moral commitment and realize that the guys who went to combat are the ones who suffered the most. They are also the ones who gave the most." For that reason, Webb believes, the Viet Nam vets "in the aggregate are probably the strongest people in their age group."
Are they? That raises an interesting Darwinian problem: Which group is stronger; which is fitter? The young who demonstrated their moral energy—as well as their social clout, often enough—by avoiding the draft, by staying in college or heading across to Canada? Or the so-called suckers who got caught in the draft? (Were they stupid? Patriotic? Defenseless?) Those suckers passed through a physical and moral test that the others (however principled their refusal) will never know. So