Twenty-three years after the fact, Denny McClellan's recurring dream is still vivid. Once again he is 18, back on patrol ten miles northwest of Danang in the company of equally wary, heavily armed grunts of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. His M-16 is loaded for Charlie, and a couple of grenades are within easy reach in his flak jacket. His field pack weighs 40 lbs., and the day is surpassingly hot. The lance corporal his buddies call "Red" is sweating heavily. His squad leader, not much older than McClellan, gives a hand signal, and the patrol moves off the road and down a narrow trail. Just the beginning of another very long day in the Republic of Vietnam. Says McClellan, now a 19- year veteran of the San Francisco police force: "I remember individual days there in perfect sequence like it was yesterday."
If not yesterday, last week. Or was it last month? Certainly it can't be 15 years since the U.S.-supported regime folded like a pup tent and the remaining American Marines executed what the tactical instructors at Quantico euphemistically called a "retrograde movement" from the roof of the fortress-like U.S. embassy annex. Today chickens run helter skelter through the American compound.
But the U.S. has not extracted itself from Vietnam. From The Deer Hunter and Platoon to Born on the Fourth of July, interpretations of the war continue to be big at the movies. Television has China Beach, the award-winning series about a rest and relaxation center in Danang. The London hit show Miss Saigon, a musical about a doomed romance between a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier, will be coming to Broadway next year with seats costing as much as $100. Bookstores are filled with memoirs, histories, reprints and novels. This spring Harper & Row even published The Vietnam Guidebook, with advice for travelers to places like Hue and My Lai, although the U.S. State Department places restrictions on such excursions. Courses on Vietnam are staples of college curriculums.
The war festers like a canker in the minds of many of the 2.7 million Vietnam veterans and the 750,000 Vietnamese who live in the U.S. The 3,600 members of National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia still believe there may be loved ones locked in prisons hidden somewhere in the impenetrable Annamese Cordillera. What-might-have-been gnaws at some of the draft dodgers who fled to Canada or into the National Guard. Certainly the war prompted career choices for young men who joined the Peace Corps or enrolled in graduate school to stay out of the Army.
For the families of the 58,022 U.S. servicemen and -women who died in Indochina, the war continues as a dull ache, a pain shared by the kin of the millions of Vietnamese killed on both sides. For most other Americans, Vietnam is as much a mystery as it was 25 years ago, when apprehensive Marines in full battle gear first waded onto the beaches near Danang. But the mystery has long been stripped of its innocence and is shrouded instead in guilt and recrimination.