American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (47 page)

When Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009, he shifted the focus to Afghanistan—the “necessary” war he had promised to win.
Newsweek
immediately dubbed it “
Obama’s Vietnam
.”

The parallels are disturbing: the president, eager to show his toughness, vows to do what it takes to “win.” The nation that we are supposedly rescuing is no nation at all but rather a deeply divided, semi-failed state with an incompetent, corrupt government held to be illegitimate by a large portion of its population.

But by the time Obama took over, policymakers had been ignoring every significant Vietnam parallel for almost a decade. Nor were they likely to find other historical examples relevant—such as the fact that two previous empires, the British and Soviet, had failed miserably in their efforts to pacify Afghanistan. Instead of heeding those warnings, the Obama administration added 35,000 more troops.

Despite
Newsweek
’s
long-overdue cautionary note, it held out hope that the surge in Afghanistan would produce the same positive results it ascribed to the surge in Iraq. Perhaps General Petraeus, “architect of the successful surge in Iraq,” will “pull off another miraculous transformation.” Or, short of that, perhaps the surge would at least impose enough temporary “order” to allow the United States to withdraw without humiliation. That was a Vietnam parallel not commonly mentioned. Once again, as in Vietnam, U.S. policymakers would respond to failing wars by seeking an image-saving withdrawal, a way to preserve some semblance of American virtue, honor, and power.

There were no miracles in Iraq or Afghanistan. The 2010
Obama surge in Afghanistan
produced no decline in attacks on U.S.-NATO forces. In fact, the number of IED attacks increased from 250 per month in June 2009 to 1,258 in August 2010. And for all of the COIN rhetoric about offering protection to the civilian population, the United States greatly increased the number of “kill or capture” raids (from twenty each month in early 2009 to as many as a thousand a month in 2010). These “targeted” assassinations were typically conducted in the middle of the night, so when Special Operations Forces burst into homes it was difficult to sort out the “targets” from their relatives. Everyone was at least traumatized, if not wounded or killed.

Perhaps Obama’s most significant “surge” was his increasing use of drones to assassinate terrorist suspects in foreign countries. These pilotless, missile-carrying aircraft are operated by Americans at distant bases, often thousands of miles away from their targets. Obama has ordered hundreds of drone attacks, far exceeding the Bush administration. Most of them have been in countries with which we are not officially at war—especially Pakistan, but also Yemen and Somalia. Although Obama rejected Bush’s phrase “Global War on Terrorism” (he prefers to describe his warfare as “
persistent, targeted efforts
to dismantle specific networks”), his policies have nonetheless made U.S. military intervention ever more global.

Drone advocates tout their new instrument of techno-war as a surgically precise way to kill terrorists without jeopardizing American lives. U.S. intelligence agencies simply provide the president with a “kill list” of names of “known terrorists” and he decides whether to authorize a drone strike against them. Strikes are also authorized on people whose identities are not known, as long as their “pattern of life activity” convinces the CIA that they are involved in terrorist activity. These assassinations are known as signature strikes. A few thousand people have already been killed by drone strikes and yet Congress has still not stepped in to pass judgment on the legality, morality, accuracy, or effectiveness of this new form of warfare. Nor, to date, has the president expressed any concern about the obvious possibility that drone attacks will inspire violent retaliatory blowback against American citizens.

Public criticism has grown, but the major media have been slow to pick up the outcry and challenge official claims. Quite apart from the important question of whether it is right to assassinate anyone—even “known” terrorists—it soon became clear that drones were not nearly as precise as promised. On June 23, 2009, for example, a drone attack in Pakistan
struck a funeral procession
for a Taliban leader and killed at least eighty people. The major media mostly ignored the story, focusing instead on the death of Michael Jackson and the affair of a South Carolina governor. An estimated
400–1,000 Pakistani civilians
have died from U.S. drone strikes. At least 164 of the victims were children. Imagine the reaction if foreign drones hovered constantly over American soil with such deadly results, or what will happen when they do, since the United States has no monopoly on the technology.

Despite Obama’s rhetoric about a more precise and targeted war on terror, our mass-surveillance state operates on the assumption that enemies could lurk anywhere and everywhere on the planet—including within the United States—and so everyone should be watched. That assumption is not unprecedented in U.S. history. In the early Cold War, McCarthyism flourished because of vastly inflated fears that spies and traitors were selling out America, from the State Department to the local library. In those years an enormous, permanent intelligence apparatus was put into place. But even the Cold War surveillance system was dwarfed after 9/11. The effort to identify a relatively small number of terrorists has fueled the creation of a global dragnet so colossal no one may ever be able to map it all.

A two-year investigation by the
Washington Post
identified
more than three thousand government and private organizations
working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence. Nearly a million people with top secret security clearances were hired to participate in this massive network of domestic and foreign spying. Since 9/11 the office space for these activities has expanded by seventeen million square feet, the equivalent of twenty-two U.S. Capitol buildings. Officials insist this top secret world is necessary to keep the United States safe, but it is impossible to evaluate its effectiveness because it is so invisible, so large, so redundant, and so completely shielded from public oversight. No one even knows how much it all costs.

Given the vast expansion of America’s mass-surveillance state, a visitor from outer space might assume that the United States had suffered dozens of attacks on the scale of 9/11. In fact, the number of American victims of foreign terrorism is surprisingly low.
According to a report
sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, acts of international terrorism directed at the United States from 1969 to 2009 killed about 5,600 people (the killings of 9/11 were responsible for the majority of those deaths). The horror and pain of the 9/11 attacks cannot be diminished by averaging the human losses from foreign terrorism over a forty-year span (140 victims per year), but public understanding of the threat does require perspective. After all,
more than 30,000 Americans are killed
every
year
in car accidents, about 15,000 are murdered, and more than 400,000 die from tobacco-related illnesses.

Since we cannot replay history, there is no way to prove that we would be as safe or safer had we treated terrorism as a serious crime rather than a global war. But we can be sure that our vastly disproportionate response to 9/11 has created deeper global hostility toward U.S. foreign policy and has thus created the conditions for ever more dangerous reprisals in the future.

Will any of this history bring us to a fundamental reconsideration of our role in the world? Will candidates for president continue to describe the United States as the greatest force for good in the world, thus requiring our endless assertion of global dominance? Or will we begin to regard ourselves as a nation among nations in an ever more interdependent world with no unique right or ability to impose our will?

The claims of American exceptionalism are not easily jettisoned. They are repeated like a catechism even in times of loss and tragedy. For example, the day after the Boston Marathon bombings of April 15, 2013, President Barack Obama paid tribute to those who aided the victims. There was much to praise. Not just cops and first responders, but a wide variety of citizens like Carlos Arredondo rushed toward the scene of the bomb blasts to clear away debris and help the wounded. They ripped off belts and pieces of clothing to make tourniquets. They clung to torn limbs. They carried people to safety. They comforted and encouraged. They donated blood. Some people who had completed the twenty-six-mile run pitched in despite their exhaustion.

President Obama applauded Boston’s “stories of heroism and kindness, generosity and love,” but his tribute did not stop there. He made a larger claim. The virtue of individuals was made to represent the entire nation: “
If you want to know who we are
, what America is, how we respond to evil—that’s it. Selflessly. Compassionately. Unafraid.”

Flattering words like these are seductive, thrilling in triumph and consoling in loss. We are an exceptionally good and caring people; a good and caring nation. The people and the nation are one. Who “we” are and America “is” are identical. We—and it—rise to the occasion. We look out for others. The faith in American exceptionalism is so often repeated and reinforced it has the authority of settled truth. To challenge its validity strikes many as mean-spirited, even seditious.

Indeed, the faith is so well guarded, evidence that contradicts it is automatically marginalized or denied. Wrongdoing or failure is dismissed. It is “not who we are.” In terms of our national identity, we seem incapable of saying in public what gets said routinely in houses of worship every week across the country—that we are all a mix of good and bad, that we are human beings and thus inherently flawed, all too capable of violence and sin. Yet we do not apply that basic understanding of human nature to our national identity.

In 2010, a
USA Today
/Gallup poll asked Americans the following: “Because of the United States’ history and its Constitution, do you think the U.S. has a unique character that makes it the
greatest country in the world
, or don’t you think so?” Eighty percent agreed. The same poll found that two-thirds of Americans agreed that the United States has a “special responsibility to be the leading nation in world affairs.”

That’s a remarkable sign that American exceptionalism persists, even if you factor in how the questions encourage affirmative responses by supplying their own positive spin (“greatest country in the world,” “special responsibility”). Yet polls like that may reflect wishful thinking more than concrete understanding, a desire to maintain a traditional faith even while recognizing that it rests on shaky ground. They may simply show that Americans still love the
idea
of living in the greatest nation on earth, even when the reality is less and less convincing. For when you ask Americans
specific questions about the state of the nation
, they are rarely so positive. Ask about public education or the infrastructure, ask about jobs and the economy, rising debt and economic inequality, Congress and the big banks, the prison system and health care, environmental degradation and climate change, crime and gun violence, foreign policy and war. When you do, it is clear that Americans can be very tough critics of their own nation. Many realize that the United States is not number one (or even in the top ten) in many important categories. People are deeply worried about the country’s current state and future prospects, neither of which seems exceptionally bright.

The Vietnam War and the history that followed exposed the myth of America’s persistent claim to unique power and virtue. Despite our awesome military, we are not invincible. Despite our vast wealth, we have gaping inequalities. Despite our professed desire for global peace and human rights, since World War II we have aggressively intervened with armed force far more than any nation on earth. Despite our claim to have the highest regard for human life, we have killed, wounded, and uprooted many millions of people, and unnecessarily sacrificed many of our own.

Since the height of the Vietnam War many Americans have challenged the idea that their nation has the right or capacity to assert global dominance. Indeed, the public is consistently more opposed to war than its government. Yet there remains a profound disconnect between the ideals and priorities of the public and the reality of a permanent war machine that no one in power seems able or willing to challenge or constrain. That machine has been under construction for seventy-five years and has taken on a virtual life of its own, committed to its own survival and growth, unaccountable to the public, and protected by many layers of secrecy. It defends itself against anyone who seeks to curb its power. The tiny elite that makes U.S. foreign policy enhances and deploys the nation’s imperial power, but has never fundamentally questioned or reduced it. Congress has consistently been bypassed or has itself abdicated its constitutional responsibility to play a decisive role in matters of war and peace. When it does act, it is mostly to rubber-stamp military spending and defer to executive branch authority. The persistence of warmongering in the corridors of power has systematically eroded the foundations of democratic will and governance. The institutions that sustain empire destroy democracy.

But the public is not blameless. As long as we continue to be seduced by the myth of American exceptionalism, we will too easily acquiesce to the misuse of power, all too readily trust that our force is used only with the best of intentions for the greatest good. If so, a future of further militarism and war is virtually guaranteed. Perhaps the only basis to begin real change is to seek the fuller reckoning of our role in the world that the Vietnam War so powerfully awakened—to confront the evidence of what we have done. It is our record; it is who we are.

O
NE
OF
THE
FEW
POSITIVE
CONSE
QUENCES
of America’s war in Vietnam is this: it generated an extraordinary literature. From Graham Greene’s great and prescient 1955 novel
The Quiet American
to the wartime writing of many brilliant journalists, to the enormous outpouring of novels, poems, and memoirs by the war’s veterans and others, to the wide range of scholarly studies, this vast collective achievement is both daunting and inspiring to all writers who follow in its wake. No single book can do justice to more than a small portion of the whole.

The endnotes indicate my specific sources for this book, but I want here to thank those who have most shaped my understanding of this subject over the years: Michael J. Allen, David L. Anderson, Andrew Bacevich, John Balaban, Bao Ninh, Larry Berman, Kai Bird, Lady Borton, Mark Bradley, Robert Brigham, Malcolm Browne, Robert Olen Butler, Robert Buzzanco, Lan Cao, Philip Caputo, James Carroll, Noam Chomsky, Dang Thuy Tram, Robert Dean, Nguyen Qui Duc, W. D. Ehrhart, Carolyn Eisenberg, David Elliott, Daniel Ellsberg, Gloria Emerson, Tom Engelhardt, George Evans, Bernard Fall, James Fisher, Frances FitzGerald, H. Bruce Franklin, Lloyd Gardner, James William Gibson, Van Gosse, Patrick Hagopian, David Halberstam, Le Ly Hayslip, Larry Heinemann, Michael Herr, George Herring, Seymour Hersh, Gary Hess, Ho Anh Thai, David Hunt, Arnold Isaacs, Seth Jacobs, Chalmers Johnson, Ward Just, George McT. Kahin, Wayne Karlin, Stanley Karnow, Jeffrey Kimball, Katherine Kinney, Christina Klein, Ron Kovic, Heonik Kwon, Meredith Lair, Andrew Lam, A. J. Langguth, Jerry Lembcke, Fredrik Logevall, Karl Marlantes, James Mann, David Marr, Edwin Martini, Bobbie Ann Mason, Edwin Moise, Le Minh Khue, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Tim O’Brien, Gareth Porter, John Prados, William Prochnau, Andrew Rotter, Jonathan Schell, Neil Sheehan, Ronald Spector, Heather Stur, Robert Timberg, Troung Nhu Tang, William Turley, Karen Turner, Nick Turse, Tobias Wolff, and Marilyn Young.

I am forever grateful to Tom Engelhardt. Many years ago he supported my ambition to write books that might reach a general readership and helped make that possible. His book
The End of Victory Culture
, along with his extraordinary website of original online articles,
TomDispatch,
have been essential to my work.

My exemplary agent, Wendy Strothman, encouraged me to write again about the Vietnam War, helped me define my approach, and offered support at every stage. Her advice draws on great success in virtually every facet of publishing. I can’t imagine a better guide.

My friend and colleague Clark Dougan focused his great editorial talent on this project from the beginning. In some ways, I think we have been talking our way toward this book since we met in 1993. Clark’s invaluable help is based on his own extensive writing about the Vietnam War and twenty-five years as a senior editor at the University of Massachusetts Press.

At Viking, I have been the beneficiary of a supremely talented group of professionals. I am most indebted to Wendy Wolf, one of our country’s most gifted editors. She has led me through two books and I completely trust her sage and savvy judgment. I am also grateful to the meticulous copy editor Jeanette Gingold and the ever attentive assistant editor Georgia Bodnar. Thanks as well to production manager Matthew Boezi, production editor Sharon Gonzalez, and designer Katy Riegel.

Age has given me an ever greater appreciation for the superb teachers I had as an undergraduate and without whom I might never have dared to try this work. I’m especially grateful to Barry O’Connell, but also to George Kateb, Gordon Levin, and Leo Marx.

Special thanks to the many students at the University of Massachusetts who have taken my course on the American War in Vietnam and the graduate students who have helped me teach it. Their curiosity and engagement always challenge and deepen my knowledge. My wonderful colleagues in the history department are a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. I especially want to thank Joye Bowman, our chair, for her steadfast support.

Many friends sustained me throughout this long process and helped me get through, and beyond, the daily stresses of an unfinished manuscript. The support of Sarah and Scott Auerbach and Christine and Jon Frieze has been especially unflagging. I also want to acknowledge Maria and Yaser Abunnasr, Carleen Basler and Henry Chang, Alex Bloom, Chris Brashear and Betsy Krause, Kathy and Jim Brennan, Nick Bromell, Chris and Todd Felton, John Foran and Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Richard Joffe, Chris and Julie Keller, Mary and Chris Kiely, Ray and Taryn La Raja, Linda Levine, Cindy and Rolf Nelson, Barry and Kristin O’Connell, Pam and Bart Rietkerk, Kim Stender, Sue Thrasher, and Eric and Jessica Wilkinson.

Karen and Steve Baumann, my sister and brother-in-law, are among my closest friends and I have always drawn strength from their love. My brother-in-law Alex Green has been a best friend since high school and the extended Green family is now a part of my own. Many thanks to all of them for including me so fully: Julia Penrose, Peter and Mary Green, Andrew and Bettyanne Green, Doug Green and Trish Dunn, Bill Green, John and Michelle Green, Eleanor Craig and my father-in-law Paul Green. Thanks also to virtual family members Tamar and Greg Kaye.

My mother, Shirley Appy, now living just down the road, has always been there for me—a model of support, love, generosity, and renewal.

To my sons Nathan and Henry—thank you for being your wonderful selves. I love you both so much. Daughter-in-law Shannon and granddaughter Maelyn compound my joy and pride every day. And no one could be blessed with more accepting and loving stepsons—Spencer, Dylan, and Ian Kaye. I treasure you all.

My wife, Katherine, enriches my life beyond measure or words. Among her many beautiful gifts I will mention only one: she is the keenest and most empathic listener I have ever met. It is the foundation of her great insight and generosity. The dedication of this book is a limited token of my unlimited love.