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To Walter Capps, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "Viet Nam means that patriotism can never again be understood in the simple way it was before." It was a loss of innocence for a people accustomed to regarding themselves as uniquely virtuous-so much so that some of them took to seeing themselves as uniquely evil. As Critic Morris Dickstein has written: "In Viet Nam, we lost not only a war and a subcontinent; we also lost our pervasive confidence that American arms and American aims were linked somehow to justice and morality, not merely to the quest for power."
In an interview not long ago with Public Television's Bill Moyers, the poet Robert Ely argued that Americans have yet to experience a necessary catharsis: "We're engaged in a vast forgetting mechanism and from the point of view of psychology, we're refusing to eat our grief, refusing to eat our dark side, we won't absorb it. And therefore what Jung says is really terrifying-if you do not absorb the things you have done in your life, like the murder of the Indians and bringing the blacks in, then you will have to repeat them. As soon as we started to go into Viet Nam, it was perfectly clear to me that what was about to happen was that the generals were going to fight the Indian war over again."
Yet there has been dislocation, loss and grief. Dr. Harold Visotsky, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University, speaks of the "loss of youth, damaged lives, loss of the chance to be young-jumping from youth to middle age." Such losses were sustained by a comparatively small part of the population, of course-the poorer, less visible young men who could not escape the draft through college.
Some psychologists believe Viet Nam was like a death in the American family; it may demand that the country somehow go through the various stages of mourning: denial, anger, depression and finally acceptance. "If people don't mourn," says Loyola University Psychologist Eugene Kennedy, "they have other problems. Many of our problems now stem from wanting to be quit of Viet Nam but not wanting to work through it. We still tend to deny it: we don't want to hear about the lives sacrificed, and who they were-that they were not'the boys in college, but that we sacrificed the sacrificeable ones."
Visotsky, a bit grandiosely, calls movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter "Hollywood's version of our Nuremberg trials." But it is much easier for a people to try its defeated enemies than to sit in intelligent judgment on its I own defeat. Victory requires only an idiot grin; defeat demands patience and improvisational wit. Americans should not become impatient with the stages of their adjustment to fallibility. It may be that America's most profound moral experience was the Civil War, but as both races understand, the nation has scarcely begun to absorb all of its implications. -Lance Morrow