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When all the cultural prisms were laid one upon another, the effects of distortion and mendacity and ignorance made a clear view of the war extremely difficult. For the Viet Cong, often serving the Americans by day and killing them by night, duplicity was the chief weapon of survival. Lyndon Johnson never leveled with the American people about his intentions in the war. He wanted his Great Society too much, he wanted to win both the War on Poverty and the war in Southeast Asia. And Johnson's problem remained America's problem for years: the nation somehow never quite squarely looked at Viet Nam and asked itself what it was doing there. A certain legerdemain was the official style of Viet Nam. Americans deliberately tried to fight without stirring up war passions at home--with the result that the passion, when it came, was one of revulsion. The Americans tried to fight a "limited war." The Vietnamese Communists were fighting an absolute war.
In the field, the Americans were encouraged to lie about their "body counts" (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most purely true thing that can be said about the American war in Viet Nam. It has the tragic grace of the incontestably lost and therefore the incontestably true--the names of those who died in such a context of multiple illusions.
The way that history has played itself out in Southeast Asia has considerably complicated some of the old simplisms of the era, and therefore changed some old opinions. The North Vietnamese, whom Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos once called "the Prussians of Southeast Asia," have imposed a grim, repressive regime throughout the country, but most forcibly upon the South. Ambitious and militaristic and given to a Stalinist style of dogmatism, they have turned the South into a police state. They have even abolished the old National Liberation Front, which they had long billed as the voice of the people in revolutionary South Viet Nam. Though they run one of the poorest nations in the world, the Vietnamese invest their best brains and creativity in the military: they have occupied Cambodia and Laos, resuming a campaign of expansionism that was interrupted more than a century ago when the French arrived to colonize Indochina. It is ironic that the Vietnamese, so often sentimentalized by the American Left as a simple and gentle peasant people, are the imperialists of the region, restlessly putting new Vietnamese settlements in neighboring countries, seeking Lebensraum.