Nation: Viet Nam Comes Home

Two winning films signal the struggle to learn from a lost war

Englishmen who fought at Ypres and the Somme carried the Oxford Book of English Verse in their haversacks; such literary brigades in the trenches would find their minds chiming with a line of Keats, or William Dunbar's Timor Mortis Conturbat Me. The Americans in Viet Nam usually packed more kinetic cultural effects. Images given them over the years by movies and television would sometimes unreel in their brains as they moved toward a tree line or a Vietnamese village, and in bizarre synaptic flips between reality and pictures, they would see themselves for an instant as, say, Audie Murphy winning his Congressional Medal of Honor in To Hell and Back. One writer called these dislocating fan tasies "life-as-movie, war-as-war-movie, war-as-life." The men could ridicule "John Wayneing," but the effect was metaphysically spooky. And, of course, it could get you killed.

Much of the American grief in Viet Nam was played out in the national imagination by way of movies and television. If the grunts on search-and-destroy in the Central Highlands sometimes kept themselves going with a jolt of John Wayne from The Sands of two Jima, the people at home took their war each night live in their living rooms, mainlined by television directly into the bloodstream. Viet Nam was so intimately recorded that it became almost unendurably real-yet also impossibly remote, 9,000 miles away, a dark hallucination. And along with the war on the tube came the rest of the theater of the '60s: riots, assassinations, the antiwar moratoriums, the Yippies' carmagnoles, the circus of the counterculture.

By the late '70s, those eruptions seemed as long ago as the Great Awakening or the Indian wars. Besides the sheer passage of time, there appeared to be a willful repression of the nation's longest war and its only military defeat. The forgetfulness amounted almost to national amnesia. Two or three years ago, literary agents would tell their writers: "I can sell anything you do, but not about Viet Nam." Except for a foolishly frisky little combat comedy called The Boys in Company C, Hollywood would not touch the war-unless you count John Wayne's 1968 Green Berets, which might as well have been produced by William Westmoreland. As Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) put it several years ago, "I don't believe the war in Viet Nam can be treated in a 'popular film.' We have no capability to confront events of that enormity head-on." It was taboo, a secret, like a spectacular case of madness in the family.

But now the psychological time-lock on Viet Nam seems to have expired. 'Books have been tumbling out of typewriters, laden with confessions, accusations and revisionist history. American foreign policy, which for much of the '70s has suffered from a post-Viet Nam, post-Watergate reticence and drift, has grown somewhat more assertive; there are even signs of a backlash of truculence in some quarters.