(8 of 11)
Viet Nam was like a complicated and painful death in the American family. The war and all the vividly theatrical, surrounding violence of the '60s profoundly damaged the nation's spirit, its faith in itself, its authorities, its institutions. Citizens no longer knew what their citizenship meant; men no longer knew what their manhood demanded. The war cost more than Americans could immediately pay. It put the nation into a kind of mourning; perhaps Americans will not be rid of the experience until they have passed through the customary stages of grief: denial, anger, depression and, ultimately, acceptance.
If that is true, a revived concern about the Viet Nam veterans reflects an end to denial—perhaps even to anger. Says Yale Psychiatrist Art Blank, himself a vet: "America is trying to confront Viet Nam through the veterans; the country had suppressed the war, didn't want to deal with it." Now the nation may be evaluating the long-term damage.
For years, publishers and literary agents assumed that Americans were terminally exhausted on Viet Nam; books on the subject would not move. A buried —and elitist—corollary of that theory held that since the nation's best and brightest sat out the war under the protection of draft exemptions, the less literate men who went to do the fighting were incapable of producing a literature of the war. Certainly they could not create anything comparable to the splendid output of the English after World War I —the generation of Robert Graves and Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.
But Viet Nam has brought forth excellent work: Ron Glasser's 365 Days, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, James Webb's Fields of Fire, Phil Caputo's A Rumor of War. Now, more veterans seem to be emerging from their long, isolated silence. They have recorded their memories of the war in two new oral histories: Al Santoli's Everything We Had and Mark Baker's Nam. A group of actors led by Tom Bird have formed the Veterans Experience Theater Company in New York City. T.J. Anderson, Fletcher Professor of Music at Tufts University, is working on an opera called Soldier Boy, Soldier, about the readjustment problems of a black Viet Nam vet. A San Francisco veteran named Tad Foster has come forth with a mordant collection of cartoons called The Viet Nam Funny Book. The Viet Nam War is even, finally, good for laughs.
Georgia-born Blake Clark, 35, now works the Comedy Store in Los Angeles, drawling through a nervy routine that may prove Americans are far enough away from Viet Nam to find it unexpectedly funny. "Hi," Clark begins, bunking into the lights. "I'm a veteran, went to Viet Nam. It's always hard to say that. People have these preconceived notions about you.