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Perhaps the most important change in American attitudes toward the war in the past few years has been the public acceptance of those who fought. The Viet Nam veteran, after a long struggle, has acquired a considerable respect--if not entirely the Government benefits (educational and medical) that he deserves. One sees the change in television shows, for example, or in movies. During the '70s, the Viet Nam veteran was often portrayed as a murderous psychotic (as in the 1978 movie Taxi Driver) or as a drug-wasted, haunted loser. In Coming Home, he became more sympathetic, though in one character he was a cripple, and in another, bitter and troubled and suicidal. The Deer Hunter ended with an elegiac singing of God Bless America in a blue-collar bar in Pennsylvania. In today's story lines, the Viet Nam vet tends to be a self-reliant hero, muscular and handsome--men like Tom Selleck in TV's Magnum, P.I., or the cartooned heroes of The A-Team.
Some movies reverse the moral onus that Americans long felt about the war. They are fantasies of revenge, like Missing in Action, in which Chuck Norris returns to Indochina to rescue old buddies still held there by evil Vietnamese who look like the wily, despicable Japanese in World War II films. These changes reflect a very literal and significant transaction. They suggest that in the American imagination, the Viet Nam veteran, erstwhile psychotic, cripple and loser, has been given back his manhood.
Viet Nam veterans, maturing into their 30s and 40s, have begun to achieve some power in American society. They are seen more as leaders, less as victims. Charles Robb, who commanded a Marine rifle company in 1968-69, is the Governor of Virginia. Bob Kerrey, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who lost part of a leg in action as a member of the Seals, a Navy special forces unit, is the Governor of Nebraska. John Kerry, a Navy officer and eloquent spokesman against the war during congressional hearings in 1971, is a Senator from Massachusetts. Veteran and Writer John Wheeler, who was a chief organizer for the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, is secretary of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the residually romantic view of war (up until recently, the American view), it was an essentially knightly exercise--a man riding out in resplendent armor (B-52s, perhaps, Hueys, the light observation helicopters known as Loaches, all of that brilliant technology) to rescue the innocent ! from the wicked. In the original versions of the knightly ideal, the wicked were the enemies of Christ, a role for which Communists qualify.
But when the knights somehow seem monstrous, killers risen out of a black id, perpetrators of My Lai, then the entire chivalric logic collapses, and masculinity itself becomes a horror--all rage and aggression and reptilian brain. Viet Nam changed American notions about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. In the '60s, during the great violence of the war, masculine power came to be subtly discredited in many circles as oafish and destructive. The heritage of the Enlightenment (the scientific method, progress, that dreamy Jeffersonian clarity of mind that told us all problems could be solved) now seemed drawn into a darker business. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the essential American soul was "hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer."