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The tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon is a vastly more complex occasion. The U.S. lost the war, although technically, of course, the country was out of it by the time of the final collapse. But the loss itself was not as traumatic (for Americans, anyway) as the way that the war was fought, the way it was perceived, and peculiarly hated. The struggle was waged, savagely, in Southeast Asia. But it was also fought in America, in American institutions, in the American streets and, above all, in the American conscience.
The war destroyed many lives, American and Vietnamese. But it did other damage: to American faith in government and authority, for one thing. Oddly, however, the trauma had its creative side. The events that shattered the American faith in authority also had a sometimes chaotically liberating effect, breaking old molds and freeing the imagination to create new forms, new movements (environmentalism, say, or feminism), new companies, high-tech ideas that might have been stifled by traditional lines of authority. No doubt the enormous baby-boom generation would have effected changes anyway. But the war brought with it gusts of wild energy. "Freedom," said the lyric, "is just another word for nothing left to lose." The war, and the protest against it, shook loose forces in American life and gave them a style and prestige they might not otherwise have had. Suddenly, politics came dancing with a loony phosphorescence. There was a certain giddy proximity of death in the time--rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix went tumbling down from drug overdoses, as if to dramatize the war's theme of meaninglessly, profligately blasted youth.
Perhaps it was all a gaudy American self-indulgence, the war and the music getting together to create a prototype of the rock video. In both the countercultural side-show and the councils of power that made war policy, there was a note of manic narcissism, of self-importance, almost of autoeroticism. There was dangerous fun in the air, the sheer buzz of so much power, a life-and-death excitement. But someone should have known better.
Sometimes, in the American context, it is difficult to know whether to judge the Viet Nam era in historical terms or in psychiatric terms. One can look at it coolly, from the outside, as geopolitics, weighing the gains and losses and ironies of the war. But then there comes, even to the civilian (we are all, beyond a certain age, veterans of Viet Nam), a vivid flashback, and the mind fills with the war again. It comes back and back and back. Charles de Gaulle called Viet Nam "rotten country," and he was right in a psychic as well as a physical sense. Rotten, certainly, for Americans. Viet Nam took America's energy and comparative innocence--a dangerous innocence, perhaps--and bent it around so that the muzzle fired back in the nation's face. The war became America vs. America.