Time Essay: HOW SHOULD AMERICANS FEEL?

Until a few weeks ago, Americans enjoyed a comforting illusion: the feeling that Viet Nam and all its horrors had somehow gone away for good. To be sure, the shells were still being fired and the countryside wasted, but Vietnamese were now fighting Vietnamese. The memories of a divided America, the alienation of the young, the riots and marches, the massacres and courts-martial—for many, these were still alive and bitter. But the U.S. had finally extricated itself from a war that had traumatized American society for a whole generation.

Then, with stunning suddenness, the war burst upon the U.S. all over again. Hué, Danang, Pleiku, Kontum—hearing the names once more is like suffering a relapse of some virulent disease. It is impossible for Americans to regard the flow of refugees and the anguish of the orphans without pangs of sorrow and even outrage. Every image of a bewildered child, of a weeping mother, makes a claim on the conscience. However disastrous the final results, most Americans once sincerely felt that they were aiding these people. Now one cannot escape the obvious question: If the long American presence in Viet Nam was misguided, is the American absence now also to become a national nightmare? Must Americans feel as haunted about the close of the war as they were about its conduct?

The official answers have not been reassuring. In his press conference, President Ford seemed to believe that the sacrifice of U.S. dead and wounded would be in vain unless Congress voted new military aid to Viet Nam. Many Vietnamese and foreign observers were quick to blame the U.S. for the plight of South Viet Nam. Saigon's ambassador to Washington, Tran Kim Phuong, stated that it is "probably safer to be an ally of the Communists." In a wild-eyed broadside in the New York Times, Sir Robert Thompson, consultant on guerrilla warfare to President Nixon, argued that "a new foreign policy line has already been laid down by Congress: if you surrender, the killing will stop. It is a clear message, to the world, of the abject surrender of the United States."

A calmer reckoning of American responsibility must be made in several stages—the initial involvement, the continuation of the war in the face of prohibitive human and material cost, the withdrawal of American troops and airpower, and finally the events since the Paris peace accords.

It is now almost universally conceded that the American intervention in Viet Nam was a mistake—a mistake that involved four Presidents, many of the nation's top statesmen. Once they had followed the French into the wrong war for the wrong reasons, they failed to heed the evidence that—short of the notorious suggestion to bomb the country back into the Stone Age—the Viet Nam War could never be "won" in the traditional sense. At fault perhaps was an American inability to accept defeat, or a hypnotic preoccupation with the models of previous, simpler wars. There was no precedent to quote, no guidebook to lead the way out.