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In somewhat muted form, there is as much ambivalence about Viet Nam among today's students as there was in the nation at large during the '60s. At the University of Colorado, Historian Robert Schulzinger observes, "As the war itself was divisive, its memory is divisive. You still have highly nationalist students who would try to do it again, only this time getting it right." But he also senses a "wistfulness" among other students for the glamour of antiwar activism.
A course at the University of California at Santa Barbara deals with the religious dimensions of the war. Some 900 undergraduates are enrolled. At most lectures there is a clutch of Viet Nam vets sitting in the front of the hall wearing bush hats or parts of old jungle fatigues. Sometimes one of them stands up after the lecture and tells his story. A few months ago, a veteran named John Murphy described how just 72 hours before he was to rotate back to the States, he found himself in a fire fight. He and a dozen buddies survived, in part because Murphy attacked a Viet Cong with the only weapon left, his teeth, which he sank into the guerrilla's neck. Soon afterward Murphy was flown home, and was making some travel arrangements in a phone booth in Seattle when he looked up to see "a hairy bastard," presumably an antiwar activist who did not like people in uniform, poised to throw a tomato at him. Murphy bolted toward him, knocked him to the floor and sank his teeth into the man's neck as police pulled him away. No charges were brought. Murphy, now pursuing religious studies, said he had never told that story to anyone for 14 years. After a pause, a student rose in the audience and shouted, "Welcome home, John Murphy!"
The premier issue of a new annual magazine has appeared on some racks. It is called Vietnam Combat, subtitled The Blood, the Guts & the Glory of the American GI. The magazine romanticizes the war and its warriors, details battle strategy, and best of all, for just $2.95, describes the American victory. A considerably more serious project is a 20-volume history, overseen by Robert Manning, former editor of the Atlantic, and distributed by TIME-LIFE Books, called The Vietnam Experience. Originally intended to sell about 120,000 copies, it has stirred enough interest so that its press run will probably be quadrupled.
Meanwhile, ROTC programs are enjoying a popularity that is disconcerting to anyone who remembers the days in the late '60s when such operations were thrown off most U.S. campuses as being virtual agents of fascism. The service academies have up to 45% more applications than in 1979.
Viet Nam takes on different lights and different perspectives when held at a slightly different angle. In a sense, Viet Nam was an unthinkably intricate and insoluble tragedy of lies--lies and exaggerations and distortions on all sides. It was as if the war involved some primal falsification, something like original sin, or else, less grandiosely, a deep incompatibility of cultures --and from that lie others flowed, fluently and poisonously and endlessly.