“Delusional and reflexive invocations of American exceptionalism”: What the GOP field won’t admit about our history may make everything worse

By continuing to deny the real lessons and history of Vietnam and Iraq, we are set up to repeat tragedies again

Robin Lindley
History News Network

2016-1-4

Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Reuters/Gary Cameron/Joe Skipper/Jose Luis Magana)

The Vietnam War ended 40 years ago, yet this brutal episode continues to haunt America and affect our foreign policy, our culture, and our national identity.

The war left more than 58,000 Americans dead in combat and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese dead, including many civilians. Indeed, U.S. wartime policy encouraged the dislocation and destruction of civilians in the war zone. And the catastrophic war left the idea of American exceptionalism in tatters as the conflict came to be seen by many citizens as unnecessary and immoral, undermining the basic American belief that the United States is the greatest force for good in the world.

In his wide-ranging book “American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity” (Viking), historian Christian Appy explores the complex history of the war, from the Cold War fear and idealism that led to the initial American involvement to the ruthless and seemingly endless and grotesque conflict that perplexed the military, devastated Vietnam, and fueled an antiwar movement at home. Appy also looks at the aftermath of the war, analyzing the amnesia and pumped up patriotism in its wake as well as the wariness of further military intervention. But, as Appy observes, historical memory faded and policy makers after 9/11 ignored the lessons of Vietnam, launching protracted and indecisive wars in the Middle East as an imperial presidency directed foreign affairs without the consent of the citizenry.

In his study of the Vietnam War and its legacy, Appy considers official documents, personal narratives, and cultural artifacts including books, music, and movies. His thoughts on works from the movies “Rambo,” “Platoon” and “Top Gun” to the writing of Michael Herr, Richard Stone, Robin Moore, and Tim O’Brien and the music of Bruce Springsteen and others reveal the complex and contradictory artistic responses to the war.

“American Reckoning” has been praised for its original research, compelling narrative, and fresh perspective on recent history. For example, historian Nick Turse commented: “A triumph of originality. Appy weaves together a rich tapestry of sources into a completely innovative, eye-opening, and compulsively readable account of the Vietnam War and its far-reaching consequences. ‘American Reckoning’ offers a fresh lens for understanding the United States in the context of its most controversial conflict as well as its twenty-first-century wars.”

Professor Appy, you’re a renowned expert on the history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. What prompted you to study the war? Was there a special incident or the experience of a friend or mentor that inspired your work?

No, certainly nothing dramatic. How I became so intensely committed to the subject remains something of a mystery to me. I grew up just in the wake of the Vietnam generation, turning 18 the year the draft ended in 1973 and the last U.S. troops were withdrawn. I didn’t have any friends or family who served in Vietnam. Nor was I close to anyone deeply involved in the antiwar movement. But even kids like me who were relatively sheltered from the turmoil of the age could feel the powerful political and emotional undertow caused by that war—a testament to its powerful penetration of our home front culture.

I had my first really heated political argument on May 5, 1970 with a ninth grade classmate who believed the students killed at Kent State got what they deserved. I remember feeling that the war had awakened the country to many of its failings and we might therefore be all the better because of it. That proved more than a little naïve, but by the time I got to college, and especially graduate school, I felt a kind of moral obligation to educate myself much more fully about the war.

You have presented a sort of people’s history of the Vietnam War, especially with your books “Working-Class War” and “Patriots.” How did you come to tell the story of the war in this way?

It was really a product of my undergraduate education at Amherst College in the mid-1970s where I was the beneficiary of some of the best new thinking to emerge from the New Left and the political activism that reshaped every academic discipline. Thanks to my wonderful mentor Barry O’Connell (and other teachers, including Leo Marx and George Kateb), I began to think that an academic life need not be “merely academic” (to use that awful phrase) but profoundly relevant and that there were no limits to what subjects might be examined. I was particularly taken by the idea of doing history “from the bottom up.” In those days that idea was not yet a cliché, but an inspiring call to action. I first imagined I might be a labor historian and did an undergraduate honors essay on Appalachian coal miners.

“Working-Class War” began as a Ph.D. dissertation and was spurred on by the intuition that studying combat veterans would teach me far more about the war in Vietnam than official documents and would also be a way to continue my commitment to the social history of people whose experiences and opinions might be overlooked or discredited.

Can you please remind readers of why you called the Vietnam War a “working-class war”?

Because the evidence I found indicated that roughly 80 percent of the men who served in Vietnam came from poor or working-class families. The draft system of the era was class-biased in ways that allowed men with greater economic means far more opportunity to avoid military service or to find forms of service (like the military reserves) that kept them out of Vietnam. And few men of privilege volunteered. I had a personal sense of this as a teenager living in an affluent, almost entirely white, Connecticut suburb where almost everyone went to college and very few kids were drafted or enlisted.

Isn’t the military now still basically a working-class institution?

I think so, but there are other scholars who’ve tracked this far more closely than I, like Beth Bailey (“America’s Army”), who might disagree. Her book indicates that an intense, market-oriented approach allowed the military to raise recruiting standards significantly in the 1980s and 1990s. However, much of the focus of all that very expensive recruitment—especially during our apparently endless current wars–are working-class men and women. And since many of them lack attractive alternatives, the all-volunteer force can function as a form of economic conscription.

Your books give the war a human face and you display remarkable empathy in your interviews of those affected by the war, from combatants on both sides to protestors, conscientious objectors and medical personnel. What was helpful for you as an oral historian in locating interviewees and talking with those who often shared traumatic experiences with you?

One of the major challenges of oral history is a simple human one, overcoming any reluctance you might have to ask strangers for help. I got much better at it, but it’s not easy. I learned not to complicate the process by over-explaining it. I tried to keep the focus on a simple, honest statement and question: I’m working on a book about people’s memories of the war. Will you help me? Once you get a few people to help, it becomes easier to find others. And it turns out most people are willing to talk, and even to share very hard memories, so long as they believe themselves to be in the presence of someone with genuine curiosity who will treat them and their stories with the respect they deserve.

In your new book “American Reckoning,” you discuss the idealistic concept of American exceptionalism and how Vietnam undermined this sense of our role in the world. Can you briefly define what you mean by American exceptionalism?

To put it most plainly, it’s the belief that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, unrivaled not only it its wealth and power, but in the quality of its institutions and values, and the character of its people. That faith has been with us for centuries and has often had a religious underpinning—the idea that we are providentially destined for our unique mission in the world. When it reached its heyday during World War II and the early Cold War, American exceptionalism was the driving ideological force of our particular brand of imperialism. It was founded on the appealing idea that we are the greatest force for good in the world and therefore have the right and responsibility to assert “global leadership.”

Some commentators contend that the notion of American exceptionalism is founded on our history of slavery, genocide and imperialism. How do you see the origins of this exceptionalism and its role in Vietnam and in U.S. policy today?

Yes, in many ways the political and cultural values and institutions that have shaped American exceptionalism (republicanism, various kinds of freedom, etc.) were constructed on the backs of dispossessed native peoples, enslaved Africans, and, over time, the domination of many foreign lands and people. Of course, the faithful have tended to view all such devastating evidence as insignificant or temporary blemishes along the road to ever greater freedom for all.

The Vietnam War, in my view, was the first experience that shattered that broad faith. Even supporters of the war began to wonder what had happened to the invincible nation that had seemed providentially destined always to triumph. And in the face of war crimes like the My Lai massacre in which a company of U.S. soldiers slaughtered some 500 unarmed and unresisting civilians in 1968, many war supporters proposed that all nations do similarly horrible things in war. Well, that excuse is itself a rejection of a core ingredient of American exceptionalism—the idea that we put a higher price on life than other nations and cultures.

What are a few things readers should know about the origins of the doomed Vietnam War? Some younger people may be surprised that the war was not only waged to stop the spread of communism by supporting a corrupt government but also so the U.S. would “look tough in the world,” as demonstrated by the “aggressively masculine” policies of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. As a historian, how do you see that perceived need to project U.S. power?

Perhaps it’s a tell-tale sign of a dying empire when leaders know that their exercise of military power is failing but they continue the killing nonetheless in a desperate effort to avoid defeat, to avoid humiliation, to avoid looking weak.

I have a chapter called “Paper Tigers” that is really about the significance of gender in prolonging and expanding a war that American leaders believed was failing but did not have the moral courage to stop. Many of these same men had once believed that stopping Communism in Vietnam was significant to the maintenance of American power and a U.S.-dominated global economy, but by the mid-1960s most of them no longer privately felt those were the stakes. Instead, their primary concern was maintaining “credibility” and that really boiled down to preserving an image of national and personal toughness. As National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy put it, the “cardinal principle” of U.S. foreign policy was not to be viewed as a “paper tiger.”

Not only is that, in my view, a kind of insanity, but it didn’t work. The longer we stayed in Vietnam the more our international credibility was shredded. It didn’t even work for LBJ in personal political terms—the war led him to drop out of the presidential campaign of 1968. As for Nixon, his illegal efforts to silence antiwar criticism (and thus preserve his credibility) were the first crimes of Watergate that ultimately forced him to resign.