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Questions persist that once seemed, at least to the Left, to have simple answers. Did the people of South Viet Nam really want Communism? The 1 million people who have risked their lives to escape the regime have stated their opinion. Did the American bombing of Cambodia, as some contend, really cause Pol Pot's unthinkable holocaust? A Khmer Rouge leader and theoretician named Khieu Samphan actually formulated the ideological foundation for the genocide long before the Americans started bombing. Pol Pot, once in power, set in motion the "Year Zero" program that led to the extermination of one-fourth of the population, some 2 million people, his own countrymen. Such deeds originate not in the American bombing but in a mystery of human behavior that is beyond imagination.
The history of Indochina in the past ten years has silenced many Leftists or put them on the defensive about the way they embraced the idea that America's course in the war was uniquely evil. Some, like Singer Joan Baez, denounced the behavior of the new Vietnamese regime. Jane Fonda is an object of special vilification among veterans. Her husband, California Assemblyman Tom Hayden, once a leader of the New Left, admits, "I am not pure. We have, as Joseph Heller says, two lives: the one we live with and the one we learn with. The consensus on the war is still emerging."
Viet Nam, small and remote and poor, translated into an enormous presence in the American imagination. A backward agricultural country became the theater of one of the great psychodramas in American history. America absorbed Viet Nam into itself. The war brought into brutal view the discrepancies of social class that Americans have always preferred to maintain as a kind of dirty half-secret. Viet Nam was, for America, essentially a class war. The children of the poor and the lower middle class tended to do the fighting. The children of the privileged tended to get draft deferments to go to college, or to bribe doctors to concoct and certify a disability for them.