by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched episode eight of the 10-part Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Geoffrey C. Ward
(the first two credited as co-directors and the third as writer) documentary
series The Viet Nam War. In a
way it’s a follow-up to Burns’ earlier mega-epics on the Civil War and World
War II (though since World War II was such a huge topic Burns decided to focus
on individual Americans who served in the portion of the war in which the U.S.
was involved and made the film more personal and less political than The
Viet Nam War). Burns’ and Novick’s
cause was helped by the fact that so many people from the Viet Nam era are
still alive — including the fascinating John Musgrave, who went from gung-ho
soldier who was a strait-laced clean-arrow young man, eager to fight the Reds
halfway across the world, to increasingly doubtful young man wondering whether
the war was worth it, to out-and-out hippie (the closing shot of episode eight,
“The History of the World” — a line from one of Burns’ and Novick’s
interviewees, who said that the history of the Viet Nam War was a microcosm of
the history of the world, which is arguable but also a sad commentary on how
much of its history the human race has spent developing new ways, and also new
excuses, to kill each other in mass slaughters that, unlike killing in the
animal world, have no real point and don’t help us survive as a species — shows
Musgrave with a thick head of long, bushy hair, a jolt compared both to what he
looked like as a servicemember in Viet Nam and what he looks like now) to
philosophical old sage. This episode focused on the Viet Nam conflict itself
for the first three-fourths of its two-hour length, and only then did it cut
back to the home front, to the growing unrest on the college campuses —
especially the mass reaction to President Nixon’s invasion (for which he coined
the term “incursion” — I remember Eugene McCarthy joking that the problem with
the word “incursion” was it had no verb form: when there’s an invasion, you
invade, but what do you do when there’s an “incursion” — you “incurse”?) of
Cambodia, which left a lot of Americans wondering why he was expanding a war he
was simultaneously claiming to be winding down, and which in turn led to the
Kent State killings of four students (one of whom, ironically enough, was not an anti-war protester but an ROTC scholarship
student who just got caught in the cross-fire while going from one class to
another — which didn’t stop his family members from getting letters denouncing
their dead son as just another “dirty Commie” the U.S. was better off rid of)
by National Guardsmen firing in strict formation.
What’s really fascinating about The Viet Nam War viewed through the lens of the Trump Presidency —
more even than Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump has turned himself
into the personification of the white backlash and the reaction against the
civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the Queer movement, the expansion
of the welfare state and the anti-war movement of the 1960’s (which means that The
Viet Nam War plays quite differently
from how it would have if Hillary Clinton had won last year’s election) — is it
shows just how early that reaction solidified. In 1968 polls showed that 56
percent of Americans approved of the heavy-duty police tactics used against
peace demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago; two years
later 58 percent approved of the killings of students by National Guardsmen at
Kent State — and of course in between those two events Richard Nixon and George
Wallace between them had received 57 percent of the vote in the 1968
Presidential election to Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. Those statistics
indicate just how quickly Right-wing sentiment in the U.S. hardened as a result
of, and a reaction to, the progressive causes of the 1960’s (with opposition to
the counter-culture having basically morphed from anti-hippie, as the hippie
lifestyle faded, to anti-Queer, these are still the issues that drive the American Right and
helped elect Nixon, Reagan, both Bushes and Trump to the Presidency) and how
early the conservative consensus formed that has basically dominated American
politics ever since — since 1968 the Republicans have won eight Presidential
elections to the Democrats’ five, and they’ve done it largely by appealing to
the bloody shirts left over from the 1960’s: anti-people of color,
anti-terrorist (replacing anti-Communist), anti-feminist, anti-Queer (replacing
anti-hippie) and at least theoretically anti-welfare state (though, as the
debacle of the Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, there are
a lot of white voters out there who hate the welfare state when it benefits
people of color but are just fine with it and will even defend it fiercely when
it benefits them).
“The History of the
World” also covered the My Lai massacre, a topic they introduced in an
interesting and unusual way; in the interview with Tim O’Brien, a Wisconsin
native who served in Viet Nam and later wrote what are often considered to be
the best works of fiction to come out of the U.S. experience in Viet Nam, the
novel Going After Cacciato (1978) and the short-story cycle The Things They Carried (1990). O’Brien recalled going into a part of
southeast Viet Nam the Army called “Pinkville” because it had been a major
center of Viet Cong resistance (and of Viet Minh resistance against the French
colonizers in the previous part of the war) and found the Viet Namese in the
area regarded them with a bizarre mix of hatred and fear he hadn’t encountered
in any other part of the country. He eventually learned that the reason was
that in 1968, a year before O’Brien got there, the My Lai hamlets that
constituted “Pinkville” had been the site of an outright massacre of between
347 and 504 unarmed civilians by a company from the Americal Division led by
Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley. The massacre didn’t become
common knowledge until 1970, when investigative reporter Seymour Hersh found
out about it and was able to acquire sufficient documentation to publish a
story, and while 25 U.S. servicemembers were indicted only Lieutenant Calley
was convicted (he was essentially made the scapegoat and there was even a hit
song glorifying him, “The Ballad of Lieutenant Calley,” set to the tune of “The
Battle Hymn of the Republic”).
The Viet Nam War is an excellent series, and yet it’s also all too
faithful to the spirit of the war itself, an extended conflict that just wore
down the American people as well as many of the folks on both sides who
participated in it. I’ve heard presentations by members of Maoist parties who
argue that the biggest single contribution Mao made to Marxist-Leninist theory
was working out the strategy for “protracted war,” stretching an
anti-imperialist conflict to years or even decades until the war becomes a
permanent fixture and the imperialists feel compelled to bog down ever more men
and resources until they finally give up and the progressive forces win. It does seem as if the wars the U.S. has got involved in
have become ever more protracted until we’ve lost track of the original war
aims — as happened in Viet Nam: the series includes a film clip from Richard
Nixon explaining that the war goal as of 1970 was not necessarily to “win” it
(whatever “win” meant) but to get out in a way that maintained our national
credibility intact — which plummeted morale among the “grunts,” many of whom
said, “I’m not here fighting and risking my life for the credibility of Lyndon
Johnson or Richard Nixon.” But we’ve seen the “protracted war” cycle repeat
again and again, especially in Afghanistan (where our involvement, dating back
from the weirdly misdirected response to the 9/11 attacks — as I told a person
who was heckling me during an anti-war demonstration in 2002, “Where did the
people who did 9/11 come from? Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Where did we go to war?
Afghanistan and Iraq. What’s wrong with this picture?” — has since surpassed
the American Revolution and Viet Nam as the longest war in U.S. history) and
Iraq (where we essentially destroyed a stable and secular, though insanely
repressive, government and midwived the birth of ISIS).
It’s hard to listen to
President Nixon on these film clips saying he wanted to withdraw American
troops except as advisors and “trainers” so the South Viet Namese could take up
the burden and learn to defend themselves — a strategy that worked short-term
for Nixon politically (as more U.S. servicemembers got to go home people — even
supporters of the war — felt relieved that they were going home upright and not
in body bags) but was an abject failure in terms of sustaining and ultimately
“winning” the war — just as it’s been in Afghanistan and Iraq (where in
response to the first ISIS attacks the servicemembers the U.S. had so
expensively “advised” and “trained” either turned tail and ran or, more
infuriatingly, joined ISIS — as ISIS’s leaders had actually advised them to do:
“Enlist in the Iraqi army and let the infidels train you on how to fight the
infidels”). What’s really sobering about The Viet Nam War is how many of the fights that rocked the nation
in Viet Nam are still going on, and how what political scientist Samuel Lubell
called The Hidden Crisis in American Politics in his 1970 book of that title — he argued that
Nixon was the first U.S. President to deliberately divide the U.S. people for
his own and his party’s political gain, confident that he and the Republicans
would end up with the larger half and therefore be able to dominate long-term
(previous Presidents, Lubell argued, had either sought to unite the American
people or, when they divided them — as Lincoln did with the Civil War or
Franklin Roosevelt with the New Deal — they did so over matters of principle) —
is still going on and has led to our current situation, with President Trump
and the Republicans, though a minority of the American people, have shrewdly
exploited the anti-democratic features built in to the U.S. Constitution by its
framers into a position of absolute political dominance and have become, as
Leonard Schapiro called the Bolsheviks in his history of the 1917 Russian
revolutions, “a minority determined to rule alone.”
