(10 of 11)
Coming to terms with Viet Nam —"processing it," as psychologists say—is not merely an exercise in cultural diversion; the meaning that Americans extract from their failure in Indochina will substantively affect their future. Says John Terzano, a lobbyist for the Viet Nam Veterans of America: "We are products of the World War II generation. We were brought up with a high sense of duty, honor and service to our country. John Kennedy was talking to us when he said: 'Ask what you can do for your country.' The generation following us is going to look at us like we looked at our parents. They'll see how we were treated and make decisions based on that." Terzano argues that unless Viet Nam veterans receive both practical help and symbolic acknowledgement of the sacrifice they made, younger Americans will be left with the inescapable impression that only suckers sign up—that service merely invites contempt.
The moral emptiness in the eddies of Viet Nam recalls the funk and disillusion that followed World War I. Someone has suggested that the U.S. after Saigon fell was something like Germany after 1918. The analogy, farfetched and literally false, contains a touch of truth. World War I was hard to beat as an example of dunderheaded, pointless slaughter. The men who fought it hated it just as much—and even in the same vocabularies—as the men who fought in Viet Nam. They went into it with the same illusions: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Horace told the boys in the public schools. John Wayne played the part of Horace in America. But finally, after Passchendaele in 1917, Lieut. General Sir Launcelot Kiggell saw the thing honestly. He looked out at the mud-soaked fields, burst into tears and muttered: "Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?"
The mark of a first-rate intelligence, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said, is the capacity to entertain two contradictory propositions in one's mind simultaneously without going crazy. The Viet Nam era had its psychotic moments. It may be a sign of American mental health, and intelligence, that the nation is ready to try to repay its complicated debt to the men and women who left their youth in Viet Nam, doing what their country asked them to do. Those who went to Viet Nam (whether they were volunteers, or draftees dragged there kicking and screaming) suffered through a violent complexity. It may have been meaningless. Or perhaps the war should instruct the nation in several dozen ways. Viet Nam was a painful learning experience for America, a civics lesson that dealt out violent penalties on both sides.
Joyce, a 26-year-old woman from Georgia, met her husband Don in 1972, six months after he returned from Viet Nam. He told her funny stories about the war. He did not tell her the scary ones about how, as a scout for the 101st Airborne, he would disappear into the jungle to search out enemy positions and kill Viet Cong stragglers. Joyce and Don were married. Then Don began an agony of delayed stress: sudden flashbacks, explosions of anger, a restlessness that propelled him from job to job. Joyce heard about the Atlanta vet center on a TV commercial. The couple went to a rap session there. It was a