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Philip Caputo's 1977 memoir, A Rumor of War, another excellent and painfully earned book, recalls how he was inspired by John Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you ..." Caputo joined the Marines: "Having known nothing but security, comfort, and peace, I hungered for danger, challenges, and violence." At the end of his three-year enlistment, Caputo writes, "I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51 ... Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses-a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people."
There have been other admirable Viet Nam books recently: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, Larry Heinemann's Close Quarters and Frederick Downs' The Killing Zone. Josiah Bunting, a novelist (The Lionheads) and former Army officer who served in Viet Nam and is now president of Virginia's Hampden-Sydney College, points out an anomaly of Viet Nam. "The Norman Mailers and William Styrons and all those guys stayed at Harvard for this war. The real literary genius never went." Nonetheless, Bunting expects that "within the next three or five years, there will be a major, successful Catch-22-stylG novel and film about Viet Nam. Only then will we be far enough away so as to see behind the grotesque and see how miserably and squalidly funny the whole thing was."
Movies, TV shows, plays and memoirs will eventually construct a mythic reality around the American experience in Viet Nam. World War I's catastrophic trench warfare, which nearly wiped out a generation of England's best and brightest men (France's and Germany's as well), was so utterly new and unfamiliar that a highly literate assemblage spent the next decade, at least, formulating a conception of what it had all been about. Something of the same process is occurring regarding Viet Nam.
Meantime, events in Indochina and the labors of revisionist historians and other experts with second thoughts are bringing the American tragedy there into a new perspective. The war that was fought so much with symbols in the American mind has now acquired an entirely new set of symbols: the boat people fleeing and drowning, former South Vietnamese soldiers in re-education camps ringed with barbed wire, Pol Pot's murderous regime in Cambodia. When the French were colonizing Indochina in the middle of the 19th century, the Vietnamese were just in the process of conquering Cambodia. Now they have invaded again, and have subordinated Laos as well, advancing that much closer to a possible Vietnamese elevation to the status of overlord. Their move against Cambodia spurred the Chinese, who supported Hanoi through the long American war, to invade the northern provinces of Viet Nam just after normalizing relations with the U.S.
The psychological effect on Americans of all this crisscross Realpolitik is to lift a lot of the moral burden off the American involvement. At the least, it seems less tenable to hold that the U.S. was guilty of the uniquely satanic imperialism that antiwar critics often saw-and still frequently see-behind American policy. The new conflicts in Southeast Asia add an element of retrospective perplexity to analysis of what the U.S. was doing there.