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So even the masculine hormones became suspect. Femininity was the garden of life, masculinity the landscape of death. Perhaps in a subliminal way, the long hair and beads that protesting men wore in the '60s were intended to detoxify them, to take the curse off their masculinity.
The Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in Washington two years ago, became a central symbol in the veterans' struggle for acceptance. It was not built by the Government, but by contributions, largely from the veterans themselves. The memorial's design--two long triangular panels of polished black granite, set below ground level, inscribed with the names of all the 58,022 who died in the Viet Nam War--struck many veterans as insulting at the time it was chosen. "A black gash of shame," Tom Carhart, a Viet Nam veteran and West Pointer, called it. Novelist James Webb (Fields of Fire), now an Assistant Secretary of Defense, wanted a white memorial, set above ground, with a flag. "A memorial should express more than grief," he says. "It should honor the service of those who died."
And yet the memorial has a force that even some of its critics have begun to acknowledge. It is a transcendent re-creation of the experience of the war itself. To walk down the declivity toward the apex of the walls, the walkway declining at what seems to be precisely the angle of escalation of the war, and to go deeper and deeper into the names of the dead, is to go back into the Viet Nam War. The force of so many names, the names a long incantation, listed in the order of their deaths, and the specificity of the names, each one individual, and the names seen in the black granite that also reflects the sky and the countenance of the one looking, all produce an effect that is as deeply moving as any memorial, anywhere.
For many veterans, however, acceptance has not been enough. About 5% of those who served in Viet Nam, according to the estimate, still suffer from post- traumatic-stress syndrome, a chronic form of what once was known as battle fatigue. The peculiarities of combat in Viet Nam made them especially vulnerable--never knowing who the enemy was, living in almost constant fear of attack in the bush.
Today the war has resurfaced in the American consciousness in new ways. College courses on the conflict were practically nonexistent a few years ago. Now there are hundreds of them. Some of the students taking them were not even born at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and most of them could not explain what that resolution was. To many college students, the Viet Nam War might as well be the Peloponnesian wars: both are ancient history. Many students cannot say whether the U.S. was allied with the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese.
Yet some students display a sort of spooky fascination with war and arms. Says Andrea McElderry, a history professor at the University of Louisville: "War is just 'in' now." At the University of Wisconsin, a student named Stephen Mackey says, a little extravagantly, "Fascination with the Viet Nam War has just gripped my generation. The males in my generation are just obsessed. Theoretically and strategically, the war was really good. We're getting away from the Viet Nam phobia." Mackey will join the Marines this spring.