Memory, especially collective memory, is a subtle and in many ways fragile act. Normally, we think of it as the dominion of historians, as if they always have the last word. They deliver with their fat biographies, “The Life and Times of…,” and their grand generalizations, “The Tragic Era…,” and their trenchant analyses, “The Short and Long Range Causes of…,” and it can sometimes be pretty dry stuff. Almost inevitably, such tracts recount in splendid detail the perambulations of men in power. Stock questions are asked of every historical epoch. What will HISTORY record? What will the historians think one hundred years later? How will reputations stand the “test of time?”
Vietnam will be different. For once, traditional historical method is inadequate. Facts and men in power are not at the core of this story, but rather the emotions of the generation which shouldered the profound consequences of this ill-conceived enterprise. The Vietnam generation, reacting to the decisions from on high, changed American society forever, and so the heart of the matter is emotional and cultural.
In the past several years we’ve heard quite a bit about the “lessons of Vietnam.” Briefly, it became a point of argument in the campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1984 between Gary Hart and Walter Mondale. A spate of books, usually churned out by former policy makers and historians of public policy, have purported to address the issue. Even a label now exists—Vietnam revisionism—for this brand of scholarship. The problem has been bandied around as the United States flirts with “another Vietnam” in Central America.
And yet, for all the books, for all its mention in political debate, a sense of disquiet reigns. Vietnam is not yet, by any measure, a digested event of American history. It is a national experience that is still denied and repressed, not one which is folded into the sweep of our history and which we calmly acknowledge as the downside of American potentiality.
This is partly the failure of political leadership. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were too weak as men and as leaders to educate the country on the resonance of the first American defeat in war. They needed to be the leaders of the Second Reconstruction of American history, comparable to the first after the American Civil War. If, after our first divisive war, America became a more racially equal society, then after Vietnam America needed to become a less militarist society. It did not happen. Instead, these presidents presided over amnesia and malaise. And in the great malaise, the victims were left to sort out their lives without help or respect or even acknowledgement.
Perhaps it is not entirely the politicians’ fault. Their silence or their half-hearted attempts at reconciliation, like their clemencies and pardon for Vietnam War resisters, were reflections of a national mood. For 10 years, the American people did not want to think about Vietnam. And since they did not want to think about it, politicians—and, yes, publishers and theatrical directors too—did not provide the public with food for thought. In effect, the whole culture together shut down on the subject.
Ronald Reagan changed all that. When his soldiers died in Lebanon and Grenada and El Salvador, and American patriotism again came to represent mainly anti-Communism; when Caspar Weinberger fashioned those empty phrases at the gravesites of Vietnam veterans, like “We never again will commit American boys to a war we don’t intend to win,” and Reagan himself declared Vietnam to have been a noble cause, the culture began to wake up from its long sleep. It was time to think again about the longest, costliest war in American history, for a Vietnam mythology was in the making.
But by the time it became fashionable to “think” about Vietnam, the nation had forgotten the total agony of the experience. If one reads the revisionist histories, it is as if Vietnam were only a question of whether Congress and domestic dissent shackled the military and didn’t allow it to exercise its full measure of violence. If only we had bombed North Vietnam more and sooner, or picked some spot on the coast for another Inchon invasion early on, or invaded Cambodia when it would do some good. If only…if only: it is the standard refuge of losers. The lessons of Vietnam somehow got focused on policy questions to the exclusion of emotion and generational questions. The next time you enter a guerrilla war in a jungle, be sure…What?. Sock it to the sanctuaries soon and hard! Deny the flow of arms from the outside! Then, by God, you’ll show ’em you intend to win…Such lessons are minor indeed, if they are lessons at all.
The real lessons lie in what happened to one generation of Americans. The Vietnam generation is unique in American history. The choices it faced, the manner in which it dealt with those choices, the problems it faced in the aftermath: that is the story of Vietnam. Only in dealing with that can the country come to terms with the war.
In 1985, this is far from an idle concern for some musty academic. For the Vietnam generation may not forever be unique. The truth is that at this moment there is not a sufficient appreciation of the Vietnam agony in our political community, in our culture, or in our youth, who are the candidates for the next Vietnam. We do not know it well enough to loathe it sufficiently. Without loathing, how can we prevent it from happening again? We have conveniently forgotten much of what is distasteful to remember. Memory is always that way, but this amnesia has consequences.
In my view, the most accurate, most profound memory of Vietnam lies in the arts. The novels, the plays, the painting and sculpture, the poetry—these all go to the emotional truth of the experience, and when they are good they are worth more than a mountain of books on the military campaigns or the chief political figures or the chapter-and-verse facts about the era. That is one more unique aspect of the Vietnam age. The playwright becomes more important than the historian, for in no other war of our history was the private word more important than the public pronouncements, the whispered intimacies between friends—whether dignitaries or the boys in the streets and trenches—more important than statements from lecterns or barricades or muddy fox-holes. For such whisperings are seldom recorded. With the Vietnam experience, the history is the subtext.
But there is here also a question of the audience. We of the Vietnam generation, particularly the artists who have something to say about our experience, have the problem of how to get people to listen. Our message is not nice and jolly, although we may employ humor or satire or parody or the absurd to get it across. In the current mood of America, strong voices easily drown us out. Those voices are not only loud but soothing, especially so since the country avoided the issue for a decade. It is flattering to be told now, if you are a Vietnam veteran, that yours was a noble cause, even though you never thought of it as a cause or as yours while you were enduring it. It is flattering to have memorials erected to your bravery and sacrifice, not only in Washington but in many state capitals. That veterans became passionate, almost hysterical, over whether their symbolic representation in a statue had a heroic or merely reflective air goes to their own internal conflicts within their own memory. Such internal conflicts are the stuff of the stage.
The wall in Washington, after all, is not the only memorial which bears the names of the war dead. There is another memorial to the American soldier—smudged and nearly overgrown by the relentless jungle—in a village in Vietnam called My Lai. Upon its cement surface are the names of 504 Vietnamese dead. Over there, a different mythology is being created: that all American soldiers were Lieutenant Calleys. The American soldier as devil competes with the American soldier as misunderstood, scorned, rediscovered and, finally, ennobled warrior. One does not have to travel halfway around the world to appreciate those competing images. They exist, dramatically and poignantly, within the soul of veterans and Vietnam avoiders alike.
The literature of Vietnam is now vast, and it is quite possible that before the final coming to terms is over, this war will compete even with the American Civil War in its literary output. If you want to know more about the “post-traumatic stress syndrome” that Emily Mann dramatizes so unflinchingly in Still Life and Steve Metcalfe highlights in that cruel line of Strange Snow where the sister speaks to her veteran brother of “generosity and love, feelings you’ve forgotten,” there are reams of psychological tracts available. If you want to know more about those who said no, the dirges on the anti-war movement exist, but you will do far better to see a sprightly production of Michael Weller’s wickedly funny and wonderful Moonchildren. If you want to delve into the latent violence the fear of Vietnam induced, the psychiatrists have looked at that too, of course, but it’s all there in a much more arresting form in David Rabe’s Streamers. Thick government studies have the statistics about how 80 percent of Vietnam veterans either disagreed with Vietnam policy or did not understand it, but as you regard the carnage on the stage at the end of Streamers and hear Richie say “I didn’t even know what it was about exactly…,” you will understand better what fighting and killing for no apparent reason means to the individual. In Still Life, you will learn that it means drugs, and divorce, and jail, and a loss of manhood. These are the social costs of fighting a war so adverse to the noble and radical principles upon which the country was founded.
The same dense studies show that the Vietnam veteran was distinguished not so much by the color of his skin as by his lack of education. Standards of leadership had to be lowered as in no other war in American history. The best, the brightest and the most cultured stayed away. Lieutenant Calley could never have been an American officer in any other war. In Botticelli Terrence McNally skillfully turns this situation upside down by giving us two wildly cultured grunts playing a parlor game outside a tunnel entrance in the jungle. Thus, the playwright teaches by inversion, a technique that artists can bring off best. Likewise it took an artist like Amlin Gray, in How I Got That Story, to make an essentially absurd war even more grotesquely absurd than it actually was, thereby making us laugh while we hurt. And by exploring the relation between madness and bravery and the hypocrisy of official honor, Tom Cole’s Medal of Honor Rag will give you a powerful point of view for the next time the Pentagon hands out 8,000 medals.
In short, all the important lessons of Vietnam can be found in the varied works of our own playwrights, in forms that enable the lessons to be felt and understood totally with the heart and soul, as well as with the mind. Such total understanding, with the total acceptance that understanding brings in its wake, is the only way that American culture will come to terms with the Vietnam memory.
Our playwrights also demonstrate a point that many, even in the theatre, will not readily accept: that the stage has a special role in presenting living issues of the day. Its tools are beyond those of the historian and the journalist, for the stage is at home with the interior of things. In that sacred precinct, very often a deeper truth lies. The theatre is not at its best when it attempts to reproduce history or contemporary politics, but rather when it presents a concept of history against which the audience can test its own perceptions. The stage can humanize history and bring it alive, while professional historians and the television are dehumanizing. Such dehumanization is especially common with terrible events like Vietnam and Jonestown, where the public is shocked by the unthinkable.
The stage must recapture its proper confrontational role, making itself important not just by dealing with emotional issues of recollection and memory, but with issues that the society debates now, today. For the stage can pierce the shroud with which television covers our world. These plays show that playwrights are ready to apply their special gifts to the contemporary scene, to reclaim their special wisdom in relation to the affairs of today. It’s up to the theatres to dare to let these voices be heard. Audiences, even in 1985, will respond.
James Reston, Jr. is the author of two novels, several nonfiction books and two plays, Sherman, the Peacemaker and Jonestown Express. His most recent book is Sherman’s March and Vietnam (Macmillan). This article is Reston’s introduction to Coming to Terms, a landmark anthology of plays about the Vietnam war experience and its aftermath, to be published by Theatre Communications Group. Coming to Terms will be released on May 7, 10 years to the day since the U.S. withdrew its troops from Vietnam.
