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Viet Nam left the nation with a massive and interlocking sense of bad conscience. Says Pollster Daniel Yankelovich: "Those who didn't serve have a bad conscience. Those who did and those who supported the war and then changed their minds have a bad conscience. And the way we treated the soldiers who served there gives us all a bad conscience." Those who fought in the war carried a burden of guilt unrelieved by the customary rites of absolution, by the parades, the welcome home, the collective embrace that gathers a soldier back into the fold of the community after he has been sent out to commit the inevitable horrors of a war that his elders told him was necessary.
It was a particular idiocy of Pentagon practice that men went to Viet Nam alone, stayed for a year and then came back alone. The policy ensured that 1) there was rarely any soldier in a combat zone who had more than a few months' experience at it, and 2) the men thus rotated in and out tended to feel isolated, not part of the unit.
Those who stayed home, or even fought in the streets to keep from going, now feel guilty about those who fought and never came home. Most of those who sent the soldiers to Viet Nam are still pained by what they did, and they usually cannot--or will not try to--explain it. Veterans speak most bitterly about those who sent them half a world away to die and then retreated into silence when the war went bad.
The war in Viet Nam reverberated through the nation's life as profoundly as the Civil War and the Depression did. It was the formative, defining event for the largest generation of Americans ever, and it divided that generation in ways that will be felt for years. The war deflected and thwarted what might otherwise have been the productive idealism of the enormous baby-boom generation.
The sheer passage of time has helped to heal some wounds. But it has left a certain fatalism. In Viet Nam, the G.I.'s absurdist, shrugging slogan was "It don't mean nuthin'." Today Jim Garnett, a Seattle carpenter who served as an Army supply clerk, says, "It was just something we all went through. Like when you were a kid and your old man comes home drunk at night. He wakes everybody up, everybody knows what's going on, and it makes everyone real uncomfortable. But in the morning, no one talked about it."
Viet Nam toppled a lot of dominoes in American life. It forced Lyndon Johnson out of the White House, paving the way for Richard Nixon. In a besieged mentality brought on by antiwar protests, some of Nixon's men contrived the various schemes that added up to Watergate, thereby enabling the eventual election of Jimmy Carter ("I will never lie to you").