American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (34 page)

The United States supported the Shah’s brutally repressive rule for twenty-six years and helped train his notorious secret police—SAVAK. For most Iranians, that history was palpable and enraging, the central motivation for their attack on the U.S. embassy. For most Americans, it remained a secret. TV images of screaming mobs in Tehran seemed like an inexplicable eruption of unprovoked hatred out of nowhere. In fact, it was a classic example of “
blowback
,” a CIA term for the unintended consequences of a covert operation kept secret from the American public.

The media was quick to enlarge the crisis into a metaphor of American victimhood. The fifty-two hostages were professional diplomats, CIA agents, and marine guards serving in a country with deep historic animosity toward the U.S. government at a dangerous revolutionary time. Yet the media cast them as surrogates for the whole nation, suffering for us all. It was “
America
held hostage,” not “U.S. government employees held hostage.” Interviews with anguished relatives encouraged the public to regard the embassy staff as an
extended national family
. Gary Sick, a top Carter aide, called the media coverage “the longest running human interest drama in the history of television.”

As the months passed, the sense of national victimhood grew. A
New York Times Magazine
article called 1980 “
The Year of the Hostage
,” and reported a nationwide identification with the hostages, as if “the whole nation had been blindfolded and hogtied, hauled through the streets of a strange city with people taunting them in a foreign tongue.” Nixon’s dire warning from 1970 seemed, a decade later, suddenly prophetic: the United States had become a “pitiful, helpless giant.”

The constant coverage fueled a rise of chest-pounding nationalism and xenophobic hostility toward the Islamic world. It was a stark contrast to a 1968 hostage-taking when a U.S. naval intelligence ship,
the
Pueblo
, was seized off the coast of North Korea. Eighty-two American sailors were held captive by North Korea for eleven months. They suffered a horrible ordeal but their story was quickly off the front page and there was never the sense that the entire nation was “held hostage.”

President Carter exacerbated the media frenzy by insisting that the crisis was such a priority he would not campaign for reelection until it was resolved. His “
Rose Garden strategy
” was a political flop. Instead of looking like a leader of unwavering focus and dedication, Carter, stuck in the White House, began to look like a hostage himself. His immobility was widely perceived as impotence. As the months passed, he felt increased pressure to take a dramatic step to rescue the hostages.

In April 1980 he ordered a military operation. The plan called for cargo planes carrying fuel, equipment, and Delta Force “counterterrorist” commandos to rendezvous with helicopters in the desert south of Tehran. The choppers were to carry the commandos to hiding places just outside the city, assault the embassy at night, release the hostages, and lead them to a nearby soccer stadium for evacuation.

The entire thing was a disaster. Three of the eight helicopters malfunctioned before they even arrived at the desert staging area. The commanders aborted the mission. Even worse, as one of the helicopters began to lift off, it crashed into a cargo plane, causing a terrible fire and killing eight crewmen. Badly burned survivors required immediate medical attention, so the Americans had to leave behind the charred remains of their comrades.
Time
called it the “
Debacle in the Desert
.”

It struck many as a humiliating failure that dramatized the military decline begun in Vietnam. As
Time
put it, “A once dominant military machine, first humbled in its agonizing standoff in Viet Nam, now looked incapable of keeping its aircraft aloft even when no enemy knew they were there, and even incapable of keeping them from crashing into each other despite four months of practice for their mission.”

Even the Iranian hostage-takers invoked the ghost of Vietnam to taunt their captives. According to former hostage Moorhead C. Kennedy Jr., third-ranking U.S. diplomat in Iran, “as [the Iranians] led us out of the embassy on Nov. 4 [1979], they whispered in my ear, ‘Vietnam, Vietnam.’” They also “lined the hostages’ cells with posters of crippled Vietnamese children and repeated frequently, ‘
We’re paying you back for Vietnam
.’” The Iranian payback had much more to do with America’s support for the Shah than its destruction of Vietnam, but the radical students were keenly aware that America’s first military defeat was also a profound blow to its claims of moral superiority. They knew exactly where the salt should be rubbed.

After 444 days of national hand-wringing—and Carter being voted out of office—the crisis came to an end: the hostages were released. Diplomacy had prevailed (along with $12 billion of unfrozen Iranian assets). The homecoming produced what anyone might have expected—tearfully reunited families and prayers of thanksgiving. But that was the least of it. The return also prompted a heroes’ welcome so large you might have thought the former hostages had won World War III. They were feted with ticker-tape parades, a White House gala, and lifetime passes to professional sporting events.

The whole country was adorned with
yellow ribbons
. Early in the hostage crisis, Americans began symbolizing their concern by putting yellow ribbons on mailboxes, bumper stickers, front doors, trees, schools, almost every imaginable place. The most likely inspiration for the practice was a 1973 song called “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” Sung by Tony Orlando and Dawn, it sold three million copies in three weeks and was the year’s most popular hit. It tells the story of an ex-con who is headed home on a bus. He had written ahead to his love, asking that she tie a yellow ribbon on the “ole oak tree” if she still wanted him back. In the gloriously schmaltzy ending, the “whole damn bus is cheering” as the tree comes into sight, completely covered with yellow ribbons.

The over-the-top celebration punctuated the national identification with the hostages. It was as if the whole country had been set free. The ribbons were really for everyone. It was a “
patriotic bath
,” one magazine reader wrote the editor. “What a week!” another wrote. “America and Americans stood 10 ft. tall. How great it felt!”

The hostage homecoming marked an odd and significant shift in the common definition of heroism. Throughout American history most people who achieved broad “hero” status were thought to have acted bravely and selflessly for a grand and noble cause—they had tamed the wilderness (Daniel Boone), freed the slaves (Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman), mowed down the enemy (Audie Murphy), conquered outer space (astronauts), or died for civil rights (Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr.). But what great thing had the hostages done? They had been the victims of a horrible ordeal and survived it. They had not risked their lives for a great cause; they did not carry out great deeds. They had endured.

From then on anyone who had endured hardship in the service of the United States could qualify for automatic hero status. The category soon became so inclusive it was routinely conferred on anyone who wore a uniform and performed some form of public service involving potential risk—soldiers, pilots, firefighters, police officers, first responders. How individuals performed in these roles was not the key factor. It was enough to have served. Those who put their lives in obvious peril for others, such as the firefighters who ran into the burning Twin Towers on 9/11, might still be singled out for special acclaim, but even those who did nothing of note could bask in the glow of hero status.

The watered-down and militarized reconstruction of heroism was a direct legacy of the Vietnam War. In the wake of a war that many Americans found shameful, and almost no one found unequivocally heroic, there developed a powerful need to identify heroes who might serve as symbols of a reconstituted national pride and patriotism. So deep was this hunger by 1980, it readily attached to the Iran hostages. One of the few to notice was a Miami man who complained to
Time
magazine: “We Americans are
so in need of self-esteem
that we give a heroes’ welcome to people who simply endured as captives. Neither we nor the hostages earned the right to the celebration we shared.”

The heroes’ welcome for the hostages triggered a major transformation in public perceptions of Vietnam veterans. Quite suddenly many Americans realized that Vietnam veterans had been denied the warm homecoming lavished on the hostages. Hadn’t many soldiers in Vietnam endured much worse hardship? Hadn’t they been sent into an alien and hostile land to execute a failed policy created by others? Where were their ticker-tape parades?

Those were new questions, rarely asked in the 1970s. In those days, most Americans could not imagine anything about the war to commemorate. Few people thought to thank veterans for their service to their country, because most Americans did not believe their country had been well served in Vietnam. Many veterans felt branded as losers or killers, as if the entire nation held them responsible for the war’s failures. They sensed that their very presence made people anxious and uncomfortable, if not hostile. In the years after the war, a number of films, books, and oral histories claimed that returning soldiers were even spat upon by antiwar protesters. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran, was suspicious about the accuracy of those stories and began to investigate. In
The Spitting Image,
Lembcke argues that there is no persuasive evidence to substantiate the belief that veterans were commonly spat upon by protesters. Indeed he could not verify a single case. Instead he believes the “
spat upon vet” is a postwar myth
that reflects the rightward shift of American political culture after Vietnam, a myth that contributed to a broad backlash against the protest movements of the 1960s, an effort to restore the honor of military service, and a repression of the memory that many veterans were themselves opposed to the war they had been ordered to fight.

Yet it is certainly not a myth that the homecoming experience of many Vietnam veterans was difficult and even traumatic. Soldiers returned from Vietnam as individuals at the end of their own one-year tour, sometimes just a day or two removed from the battlefield. Their thoughts were with the buddies they left behind and the war still raging. The great majority were young working-class men facing an uncertain future with limited prospects. It was left to family and friends to welcome home these veterans and try to ease their transition to civilian life. They were often as confused as anyone else about what to say or ask, and the larger society offered no guidance. There were no collective rituals of return, no national homecoming ceremonies, no official acknowledgment that millions of Americans were returning from war.

And for all the war-related controversy, veterans returned to a country that was carrying on with business as usual: going to school, getting married, raising children, working jobs, throwing parties, moving through a normal round of life as if it were peacetime. The home front was a world away from the radically different realities of Vietnam—the steaming humidity, the inescapable dust and dirt, the endless noise of American machinery at war, the countless varieties of cruelty and violence. But it was also a world away from some unexpectedly beautiful, even transcendent realities—a certain sunset in the mountains or the way the light came through an opening in the jungle, and the deep human bonds forged in perilous circumstances. You were there, and now you’re not. Welcome home.

The military and the federal government did not bring veterans together even for a simple thank-you, never mind for large-scale retraining, benefit counseling, and other forms of concrete support. Little more was forthcoming from states, schools, churches, or civic organizations. No one, least of all the veterans, expected victory parades—there had been no victory to celebrate—but
there might have been
other forms of collective acknowledgment and support. There were not. There were not even substantial public debates about how best to assist veterans as they reentered civilian life after participating in the most unpopular war in U.S. history. No wonder so many of them felt isolated, alone, and rejected. No wonder many of them chose to keep private the fact that they had ever been in Vietnam.

The isolation and alienation of veterans in the 1970s was compounded by the media. If veterans were featured at all in movies or the press it was often as drug-addled and violent. When TV cop shows included Vietnam vets as characters, they were almost invariably criminals. In an episode of
Kojak
, for example, the detective responds to a murder by telling his staff to round up likely suspects from a list of “recently discharged Vietnam veterans.” The “crazy vet” stereotype was infuriating to veterans. If it pushed some into deeper isolation it helped spur others toward political activism. In 1979,
Vietnam Veterans of America
(VVA) was founded in large part to pressure the government to provide adequate support—better treatment at VA hospitals, testing and compensation for possible Agent Orange–related health problems, improved educational and employment benefits, effective treatment for war-related psychological problems, and so on.

It was a tough slog. Fund-raising gained little traction and there were few legislative successes. VVA president
Bobby Muller
, a former marine lieutenant who returned from Vietnam a paraplegic, grew increasingly frustrated. One day in 1979, he discussed the lack of support for veterans with McGeorge Bundy. Bundy, one of the principal architects of U.S. escalation in Vietnam, was then the head of the Ford Foundation. He sympathized with Muller, but was pessimistic that the VVA could attract substantial economic support from foundations and philanthropies: “You’re the symbol of that war,” Bundy said, “and that war causes powerful people in this country to be uncomfortable and because of that they’re not going to support you.”