Those Who Have Borne the Battle (4 page)

Immediately following the American Revolution, Americans had personalized the history and found their early heroes from among identifiable officers and those individuals whose actions seemed genuinely heroic. These were the leading characters in the patriotic national narrative. Wars were not normal for this new republic, so stories about those who fought them focused on the special, the unique, the heroic. Very quickly in the nineteenth century, this evolved into a more inclusive democratic narrative in which all who served in war became heroic, if not individual heroes.
This was a neater story line but obviously a more abstracted one. It facilitated honoring veterans and proved to make easier the task of enlisting the next war's citizen soldiers. In the course of this telling, of course, individuals lost their identity, and individual sacrifice was subordinated to generalized heroism in describing war.

In large-scale engagements, such as the Civil War and the First World War, this compressed narrative became more crucial as a means to cope with the scale of battle—and of death. The young men at the front became even more anonymous. Americans developed enduring ways of remembering the dead and supporting those who fought and survived the country's wars after they returned to civilian life.

The expressed public view until well into the twentieth century was that wartime military service is an obligation of citizenship. It is a service owed, with little reciprocal obligation from the nation. The reimbursement for meeting the contract of citizenship has been the privilege of living in the United States. The American political system has provided regular exceptions to the principle that those who serve will not be entitled to special privileges. Those exceptions implicitly acknowledge that, in fact, “everyman” has not taken up arms when the situation has demanded a military force. Indeed, the “volunteerism” that was at the core of the national legend resulted often from bonuses and other incentives and pressures. Congress regularly ignored the principle of nonreimbursable “duty” through passage of legislation providing for pensions and other forms of support.

World War II proved to be by its scale and its consequences a defining experience for the nation. It was marked by a massive and successful mobilization of the American military, really the whole country, and the defeat of some forces that needed to be defeated. The world was judged better as a result of this war. For those who actually fought in the Second World War, it was largely a brutal experience. They became part of an epic and enduring narrative, often cleaned of all brutality, heroes all.

Americans honored veterans of the Second World War in significant ways, including the most comprehensive veterans support programs the government had ever provided. Even in this war, the most inclusive perhaps in American history, it was no longer possible to pretend that military service was an obligation of citizenship in which all shared. Taking up
arms was a special demand and a special sacrifice, and this necessitated some kind of special recognition.

I have a tremendous respect for those who fought in the Second World War. But I also have concerns about concepts such as “good war” and “greatest generation.” These concerns are not intended as a challenge to judgments of the goodness of the task or the greatness of those who met it. My concern is with the idea of the war's singularity, with setting the bar at the superlative, and the impact of these sorts of descriptions upon the generations and the wars that would follow.

The war in Korea came so quickly and cruelly after the end of World War II that many have come to describe it as the “forgotten war.” I would suggest that it is long past time for policy makers and others to start remembering it. This was a brutal war that tested the men who fought there; it was marked by a stubborn heroism on the part of some that deserved the description “heroic.” And it was marked as well by indifference to them and their war on the home front.

Veterans of the Korean War received benefits more or less consistent with those who had served in the Second World War, but there are emotional benefits and recognition that are also important, and these were never extended. There was little sense of a grateful nation. More important, the Korean War really did set a new pattern for American wars, and it is one that I believe is very troubling.

Beginning with Korea, America's major military engagements over the past sixty years have been, and are, wars with no crisp declaration of war and no delineation of clear objectives—at least of constant, unambiguous objectives. They are wars that have nonterritorial political objectives. They have not been total wars, as World War II had been; they have been wars in which the military is restrained from the use of full force. It is a restraint that has typically been politically and even morally necessary, but that does not make it militarily any easier. Finally, although throughout our history Americans have not fully shared in the sacrifice of war, these have been wars in which increasingly the sacrifice has been even more unevenly distributed in American society.

At West Point in February 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again
send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined.'”
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The secretary quoted General Douglas MacArthur on the need for this examination. Clearly, MacArthur's warning had not resulted in restraint over the sixty years following the Korean War. A dozen years following the Korean armistice, American combat troops went ashore in Vietnam.

As I read and reflected on the Vietnam War, I found that some of the issues of that war had not become any clearer or easier forty years later. In writing this book, I have sought to understand the public objectives and the stated goals that framed this war. This necessarily means confronting some of the errors in judgment and in assumptions, the hypocrisy and even the deception, that were part of this war. My interest here is not in rekindling debate about policy makers, but it is about the real ambivalence, the misleading assurances even, that marked the approach of those who led us to war—and the consequences for those who would be asked to fight and die in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was certainly not the first unpopular war in which Americans fought. My assumption when I began this project was that it was nonetheless the first war in which a significant part of the public blamed those who had been sent to fight the war. I was deeply troubled and puzzled as I thought about this in the context of our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If there are significantly fewer protests about these wars than there were confronting Vietnam, it is nonetheless the case that these wars are as unpopular with the public. Yet we have embraced the veterans of the current wars, a laudable impulse but an ironic one when compared to Vietnam: the current wars are fought by volunteers, whereas the Vietnam War was fought increasingly by draftees, by men who were not there by choice. Not repeating unfair acts and judgments is commendable, but it does not make the initial unfair treatment any more acceptable.

My work on the Vietnam War revealed that public attitudes toward those who served during that conflict were more complicated, more nuanced, than the stereotype. Based on polls and most mainstream political rhetoric, the American public largely “supported” those who served in Vietnam, even as increasingly they did not accept their mission or the way the war was being waged. This surely resulted in a muted support.
But even muted support is not ridicule and antagonism. Americans became puzzled by the war and troubled by the way in which they believed it was carried out. Prowar political voices often dismissed the antiwar groups as lacking in patriotism and, unkindest cut, being hostile to the young Americans serving in the war. “Supporting the troops” quickly became the most secure political position, one that transcended partisan lines. It also became an intellectual and rhetorical threat to inspire—or coerce—support for whatever objectives policy makers had deployed troops to advance.

Generalizations about the on-ground conduct of the Vietnam War, generally influenced by stories about the massacre of civilians at My Lai or by images of trigger-happy, drugged-up soldiers, led to unfortunate distortions of the service of the military in the field. And these distorted images came to have real consequences for the experiences of returning veterans. For the first and the only time since the early nineteenth century, Americans seldom used “heroes” as sweeping general descriptions of these veterans, for it was hard to be considered heroic in an uncertain cause. Many came to think of the Vietnam veterans as “victims,” but if there was some element of truth to this, it was nonetheless a condescending concept to attach to those who sacrificed when asked and were courageous when called upon.

Vietnam has proved to be a powerful and persisting presence in American culture—or at least selective memories and interpretations of it have been. The burden of what are considered Vietnam's “lessons” has influenced conversations about the American military in the twenty-first century. There has been no political consensus on what these lessons are. This circumstance affords a great opportunity for advocates of positions to find ways to support their argument by emphasizing that, of course, this should have been learned from Vietnam. For many, the assumptions by which the United States entered and subsequently conducted the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were shaded by the heavy shadow of their understandings of Vietnam.

These current wars have been complicated by shifting objectives, objectives that have become more political than military but for which the armed forces would play the major role in implementation. The development
of counterinsurgency methods is an important advancement, even as it illustrates the comprehensive nature of the mission. These wars and their complexity and their casualties have placed a special burden on the new military, the all-volunteer force.

In 1973 the United States ended the draft. Since 1940 it had been a major source of military, particularly army, enlistments. The political an-tidraft protests of the Vietnam War encouraged ending the draft, but more important was the simple demographic fact that the military required an even smaller percentage of the rapidly growing population. During the Vietnam War the draft provided for deferments and exemptions and choices that had inevitably led to advantage and protection. Perceptions of inequity were based on the reality of inequity. The all-volunteer force is less representative than the Vietnam-era military that was shaped by the draft. Even if the “citizen soldiers” of American legend were never fully representative of the society they defended, these young men and women today are less a cross-section of America. This has consequences. We pay lip service to our “sons and daughters” at war, even if the children of some 99 percent of us are safely at home.

The nature of wars and of warfare has changed. These things are never permanent, but we almost certainly have left for the foreseeable future the era of large armies mobilized to face an enemy across a huge field of combat. I would wager that we are as likely to return to archers with longbows at Agincourt as to see a replay of the massive-force landing at Normandy. It is not clear that our national narrative of how we fight wars has quite caught up to current circumstances. I conclude this book with some observations about the understandings that need to precede modern wars and about the provisions we need to make for those who fight them. I do this recognizing that events daily are changing circumstances. Historians are most comfortable writing about matters that are largely concluded. These current wars and American views of military service remain works in progress.

In a December 2009 visit to American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Gates said to troops near Kirkuk, Iraq, “One of the myths in the international community is that the United States likes war. And the reality is, other than the first two or three years of World War II,
there has never been a popular war in America.”
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Each war in American history had support at the outset, although there has also been major opposition to each, excepting World War II. That war likely sustained support until the end, although costs and goals gradually became a little less clear in the public mind. In any event, in a democracy, wars need to maintain public support in order to be sustained; the idea of “popular wars” might best be left to fiction, to totalitarian regimes, or to people who don't understand what war requires of those who fight.

 

 

When the Blakely Rifle was formally accepted at Grant Park in Galena in 1896, one of the park commissioners noted that these monuments were a “sure means of keeping alive the martial spirit which has been awakened by past triumphs.”
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It is not clear that the cannon ever evoked such feelings. They did not for me and for my generation. Cannons rest quietly in many parks in many places in the United States. They are souvenirs and trophies. But removed from their bloody context and spiked from ever again thundering their lethal intent, they are as silent as statuary and as inviting as playground equipment. They should also serve as reminders that war can touch quiet places and peaceful communities.

These weapons say little about the horror of war, but within our peaceful playgrounds and parks, they whisper that it is best to remember some things that many would prefer to forget, or even never to learn. Let the children play, but also allow the rusting ordnance to provide quiet reminders. Wars are not games, and they surely are not pleasant experiences for those who fight them. This book seeks to help us to remember that.