The Home Front: Exorcising an Old Demon

Hello, Kuwait. Goodbye, Vietnam. Next month 16 years will have passed since Americans and their friends scrambled from rooftops into helicopters and left Saigon to Vietnam's victorious communists. The pain of that and so many other Vietnam memories -- the dead children of My Lai, the shock of Tet '68, the coups and countercoups, the fraggings, the drugs, the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of American students at Kent State -- somehow only increased as the years passed. When the U.S.-led forces raced across Kuwait and Iraq last week, however, they may have defeated not just the Iraqi army but also the more virulent of the ghosts from the Vietnam era: self-doubt, fear of power, divisiveness, a fundamental uncertainty about America's purpose in the world.

The need for such an exorcism must have been felt by the anonymous U.S. Marine who, shortly after Kuwait City's liberation, paid a call on the deserted American embassy. He carried with him an old American flag, which he left at the gate of the embassy compound. Asked why by an Associated Press reporter, the Marine said the flag had been given to him 23 years earlier by a dying comrade in Vietnam. For the Marine in Kuwait City, and for many Americans who took justified pride in the U.S.'s military performance in the gulf, a circle had been completed, a chapter closed.

The crowds across the country that cheered the President's cease-fire announcement -- and his declaration that "by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all" -- were celebrating far more than Saddam Hussein's defeat. They were savoring the country's first major military victory since 1945. "This largely puts Vietnam behind us," says political-science professor Joe Cooper of Rice University. "We have the confidence now that we can define foreign policy objectives and carry them out. This will have the same effect as World War II."

In Vietnam, says Tip Hale, a Chicago insurance salesman, "we didn't have a cause that united everyone. Bush did it right. He got the cooperation of other countries, brought the U.N. in and let the experts run the war . . . If there was a war you could be proud of, this was it." Republican pollster Robert Teeter predicts that the gulf victory will especially affect the attitudes of young Americans. "These are people who had not seen the country either lead or succeed in a big way on anything for a long time, whether it was Vietnam or economic competition," says Teeter. "Now they've seen us succeed."

The Vietnam experience has been on the minds of Americans from the day George Bush dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia last August. The President took pains to vow that the mistakes of the only war the U.S. ever lost would not be repeated in the gulf. And they were not. From the massive and rapid military deployment to Bush's decision to seek formal congressional approval for the war, from the Pentagon's avoidance of macho rhetoric to the insistence by antiwar protesters that they supported U.S. troops, Americans of all sorts seemed determined to get it right this time. To the extent that any of Vietnam's bitter aftertaste was present, it was in the tension between the press and the military. And even that had dissipated to some extent by last week, when General H. Norman Schwarzkopf delivered his extraordinary briefing in Riyadh.