Radical Teacher: Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. . - Reviews

By H. Bruce Franklin. University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

Any serious student of history understands that what we know about the past is always and necessarily in a state of revision as new materials become available about any given subject. Yet the term "revisionism" has long been a term of abuse employed to sully the reputations of scholars whose interpretations of history are not in accord with acceptable opinion. This epithet has been applied to H. Bruce Franklin's work before and is certain to be again about his latest work, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies, but he has written a compelling, veracious, and exceedingly important account of the Vietnam War and its aftereffects in American popular culture, demonstrating beyond disproof that in reality it is the truth of what happened in Vietnam that is being revised by reactionaries and profiteers in their service.

In a course I've been teaching for 15 years on "The U.S. in the 60s" I once had a student inform me about "Asian Orange" a chemical he said had been employed by the perfidious communists to poison Americans in Vietnam, in violation of international law. When I demonstrated that it was the U.S. that had employed "Agent Orange," and he finally consented to believe me, his attitude toward the illegality and immorality of the matter changed suddenly and drastically. Once he understood that the substance was in the U.S. arsenal its use, he said, must have been justified by the circumstances at the time. Informed that American G.I.s and many of their offspring were also injured by such herbicides he added that this was "a price we had to pay to win the war." Somehow he had come to believe that the U.S. had won the war, if imperfectly. That Vietnamese by the hundreds of thousands had also suffered terribly--indeed this form of chemical warfare inflicted the highest rates of birth defects ever recorded anywhere--reg istered not a whit on his moral radar screen.

Where this student acquired such phantasmagoric lore I never learned but I recount this incident to underscore Franklin's most salient point about the utterly preposterous fantasies that circulate in American culture about the war in Vietnam. As he shows, the war's realities are systematically being v" or distorted by propagandistic mass media and cultural establishments hell bent on controlling public remembrance of the war to conform with the traditional core mythologies about the "American way of war" writ large.

By 1969 the war in Vietnam had all but shattered the traditional narrative by which most Americans had been taught to measure their nation's place in the world. Many citizens had concluded that, rather than Lincoln's "last best hope of mankind," the U.S. had become, in the words of Martin Luther King, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." As the nation turned forcefully against the war and the foreign policy premises in which it had been grounded, faith in traditional ideology also began to erode.

As Franklin is at pains to show, the movement against the Vietnam War--in tandem with the Civil Rights upheaval-constituted an ideological crisis, perhaps the deepest ever, that scared hell out of political and cultural power brokers. By itself Vietnam was one small part of the global system that the U.S. dominated by virtue of its victory in World War II. Its loss alone would cause barely a ripple in the system but symbolically such an eventuality boded ill. The very legitimacy of American power, wealth, ideology, and global reach were at stake. The culture war was upon us. From elite perspectives something had to be done, and soon was. Many cultural representations of the war in Vietnam rapidly came to depend on distortion, denial or outright mendacity. Thus were the terrible realities of war in Southeast Asia transmogrified into The Deer Hunter, Rambo or Missing in Action.

Vietnam was by no means the first war to be so reversed in popular culture as Franklin reminds us in his aptly titled first chapter "From Reality to Virtual Reality." The Civil War was the first industrial war, foreshadowing the carnage to come, made possible by technological improvements to machines that spit death on an unprecedented scale. Prior to the Age of Industry conflict could be glorified and sanitized precisely because no real images existed for the public. Soldiers knew, of course, but usually they were a minority, and few could bring themselves to speak of their experiences with candor in any case, so disturbing were the memories. Art, visual or literary, tended to reify war as sanctified martyrdom.

It was the technological advancement of photography that brought the reality of war home. With the gruesome realities of combat on display for public consumption who among the sane would opt again for modern industrial war? Despite the valiant efforts of some of the 19th Century's most vaunted writers--Twain, Melville, Crane--to deepen this public revulsion through literature, their masterpieces were superseded by resurgent forces of imperialism and militarism a la Teddy Roosevelt. Thus, a fratricidal war that had broken the hearts of virtually every second American was reimaged as a glorious episode (keeping in mind that the Civil War was not fought to free the slaves). As Franidin puts it:

The disgust, shame, guilt, and deep national divisions that had continued after this war--just like those a century later that continued after the Vietnam War--were being buried under an avalanche of jingoist culture, the equivalent of contemporary Ramboism, even down to the cult of muscularism promulgated by Teddy Roosevelt.

By the 1960s television technology brought war's images into every living room. While the media generally served the official line on the war ("on bended knee" in Mark Hertsgaard's telling phrase) more than enough reality filtered through to occasion widespread disgust, shame and division, as well as widespread distrust of government and business. One of the most shocking and influential images of the war is the still shot (from even more disturbing 16 MM film footage--see the 1976 documentary Hearts and Minds)) of Saigon Police Chief Nguyen Loc Loan putting his pistol to the temple of a "Vietcong suspect" and summarily executing him. But reactionaries, unhappy with the war's outcome and majority opposition to it, scapegoated publishers of such imagery as one of the main sources of American "defeatism," and began the process of reversing the roles of victim and victimizer. One decade later the "meaning" of this image was exactly inverted in the first Hollywood epic about the war, The Deer Hunter, wherein Amer ican prisoners are forced to play "Russian roulette" by their malicious Viet Cong captors. The very first scene in this film inverted the My Lai massacre by depicting the wanton murder by communists of helpless civilians. In one manner or another this theme of summary execution of American prisoners or unarmed peasants by North Vietnamese or Viet Cong cadre became emblematic of those Vietnam War films purporting to show the communists as preternaturally evil, thereby also fostering the canonization of the MIA-POW as the right's symbol of the war. Gone entirely was substantial G.I. testimony about the execution of Viet Cong, or civilians, or their torture, or the widespread incidence of rape by G.I.s against Vietnamese women, communist or not.

Nor was film the only popular medium employed to invert uncomfortable truths about American or allied behavior in Vietnam. The image of an evil communist executing the innocent became a stock-in-trade of the resurgent marker in war comic books in the postwar era. Indeed, Franldin reproduces the cover of the November 1988 issue of Marvel Comics' The Nam, derived from the infamous photo noted above, but this rime from the perspective directly in front of the scene, putting the American photojournalist at the center, and leaving the captive's face out entirely. Many young people today have seen the original photograph. Franklin illustrates the power of cultural re-imaging by recounting experiences he has often had on the lecture circuit when he asks students to explain what is taking place in the picture. Most reply that it depicts a communist executing a hapless civilian.

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In the comic book image the "shooter" is an American journalist, putatively a liberal "dove" whose action borders on treason because his photo-capture of the execution served to undermine domestic support for the righteous anti-communist crusade in Vietnam. Thus, "the logic of this comic book militarism is inescapable." The war was lost--in what became the stab-in-the-back theory of the Reagan Right--because disloyal, anti-American bleeding hearts sought to "frame" the "real" good guys and let the enemy off the hook. According to this logic, the media should be allowed to show the public only what the military deems suitable. As we know, official censorship of the news in war zones such as the Gulf and Kosovo is now absolute, though the media collaborate in their own distortion. Gone is the verisimilitude of the Civil War photographs and Vietnam footage. The images that are allowed by government for popular consumption are edited by all networks to make war resemble a computer game or spectator sport. Thus w e have come full circle to the sort of triumphalism in vogue at the dawn of the 20th Century.

"Plausibility of denial" emerged from National Security Speak during the Iran-Contra hearings of the late 1980s to become established in the popular lexicon, though, in fact, there was nothing new about it. Franklin shows that "Denial has been, in every sense, the term necessary to fathom the depths of deception and delusion essential to America's war in Vietnam." One clear example is Ronald Reagan's insistence during his 1980 campaign for the presidency that the war in Vietnam was a "noble cause" that failed because unpatriotic Americans would not let their military win. In another well-known speech in 1982 wherein the "Great Communicator" laid out his version of the war's history he managed to get every fact wrong.

Franklin lays out the catalogue of Reagan's pseudohisrory and demolishes it point by point. Teachers will appreciate his clarity and brevity here. On pages 27-28 he provides a list of the 14 "dominant fantasies" in American culture as they have been constructed and embellished over the years, ranging from the falsehoods of two Vietnams, and South Vietnam's "democracy," to the myth that the U.S fought "with one hand tied behind its back," and ending with the central delusion circulating in popular culture that communist Vietnam is today keeping thousands of American POWs in secret captivity. A thorough examination and refutation of this inventory of lies and distortions would be a more than suitable introduction for beginning students to the central issues of the war.

At the same time that Vietnam was disturbing the American conscience, and calling forth world condemnation, the U.S. government sought to counter its negative image with victories over the communist bloc in the space race. Yet despite massive media play the Apollo moon landings of 1969 occasioned only tepid reaction. Many citizens saw the hoopla as a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the debacle in Southeast Asia. In this context Franklin's deconstruction of the Sear Trek phenomenon is quite interesting and sheds light upon the ideological crisis that would soon evolve into the "culture wars." Although the series premiered in the 1960s, Star Trek's popularity developed only in the 1970s (not in tandem with the space race). In an era of war, inflation, ghetto uprisings, campus riots, rising crime rates, and challenges to racial, gender and cultural roles, Sear Trek assumed a future in which humans would overcome such problems with American leadership. Who can doubt that the Klingons and Romulans were really Soviets or Chicoms in disguise? Yet despite deliberate intentions by Sear Treks' creators to project Cold War issues into the remote future four key episodes were written to confront the dilemmas posed by Vietnam. Franklin's' close analysis of these episodes--and other popular science fiction of the era--shows how they "dramatized the traumatic metamorphosis in the war's impact on both the series and the nation." Alas, such cultural examinations of conscience are no longer in vogue. Quite the contrary.

For those who have not yet read Franklin's impressive and comprehensive analysis of the issue of POW-MIAs, M.L.A. or Mythmaking in America, his final chapter in the present book documents how high officials have flagrantly lied to manipulate public opinion and re-ignite hatred and contempt for the Vietnamese in the guise of concern for the nation's veterans, while continuing to ignore their real wounds and traumas. Among the eeriest is Zbigniew Brzezinski's statement to President Carter in 1978 persuading him not to normalize relations with Vietnam. Without an iota of evidence Brzezinski said: "The Vietnamese took hundreds of American officers out and shot them in cold blood." Perhaps Zbig was confused and thought he was referring to the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest of his native Poland during World War II. That the National Security Adviser to the President of the United States could get away with such a monstrous lie more than suggests that his credibility is missing in action and calls into doubt the integrity of the press that reported it uncritically. Even more frightening is a statement sent by a Reagan staffer for his boss to "Bo" Gritz, a legendary Green Beret and lunatic fringe right-winger, as his team of cenaries endeavored to "rescue nonexistent POWs said to be held at a secret camp in Laos: "PRESIDENT SAID: QUOTE, IF YOU BRING OUT ONE U.S. POW, I WILL START WORLD WAR III TO GET THE REST OUT UNQUOTE." This calls Reagan's very sanity into question.

With government conferring its imprimatur on the existence of POW-MIAs it wasn't long before Hollywood would attempt to cash in, releasing Sylvester Stallone's Rambo trilogy, and other equally surreal imitations. Ironically, like John Wayne, the warrior icon of the World War Two era, America's most recognizable "Vietnam veteran" was a draft dodger who spent the war years safely ensconced in Europe, later to profit handsomely off adolescent fantasies about war and warriorhood that he promoted. In First Blood, Part II, our new Deerslayer goes back to Vietnam armed with his high-tech bow and explosive arrows, freeing scads of American captives, winning the war all by himself, and punishing a few establishment bureaucrats who would not let him win the first time around. The advent of Rambo and its multifarious imitators would make the "liberation" of the POWs a quasireligious imperative. By 1991, according to a Wall Street Journal! NBC poll, 69% of the public had come to believe that Vietnam was still holding Ame ricans against their will. "Bring on Rambo!" said the Journal. Meanwhile, real veterans, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, continued to be homeless far in excess of other groups, to suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), and to engage in self-destructive behavior--including alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide. The POW-MIA dementia has been fostered by political duplicity employed to deflect attention from the real issues faced by Vietnam veterans stemming directly from the multifarious horrors of war.

The anti-war movement of the 1960s has been charged by reactionaries as anti-veteran as well. Who has not heard the canard that anti-war activists spat upon returning soldiets? The film Hamburger Hill even went so far as to depict protestors throwing bags of dog shit at returning veterans, and phoning the parents of dead GIs to gloat. Yet, as sociologist and Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke shows conclusively in his The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, the vast majority of those opposed to the war in Vietnam knew that the G.I.s were being victimized too, and did not scapegoat them for the war, much less disrespect them so egregiously. Had such tactics on the part of anti-war people been widespread the press would have had field-days covering them, and an extensive documentary record of such would exist. The only photos and film of Americans jeering (and yes, spitting on!) veterans depicts pro-war civilians condemning anti-war veterans.

The movement against the war in Vietnam was one of America's most noble moments precisely because it stood up for values that Americans have always claimed to espouse and against the monstrous desecration of these being carried out in Vietnam. Franldin is at his best when analyzing the degree to which that movement has been all but erased from popular memory, especially the participation of active duty soldiers and veterans. As early as 1945 American merchant seamen protested the use of U.S. troop transports carrying French troops to re-conquer Vietnam. In 1954 thousands of WWII veterans wrote to the White House demanding the U.S. refrain from dispatching troops to Indochina. But by then the anti-communist crusade was in full flower. Under the influence of popular films like The Sands of Iwo Jima or Pork Chop Hill, many GIs carried images of "laps" or "Red Chinese" in their heads as they entered Vietnam but many quickly learned that a majority of Vietnamese opposed their presence and that the only foreigners in that land were themselves. Many rapidly came to believe that their compatriots and innocent Vietnamese were dying for lies and vowed to bring the truth of the war back home.

Nor does Franklin scant the difficulties faced by civilian activists in bringing the horrors of the war to public consciousness. He recounts efforts in 1966 to speak with the president of United Technology Company in what would soon be known as Silicon Valley about UTC's manufacture of napalm. Said the company CEO: "Napalm will help shorten the war. Isn't that what we all want? Besides, whatever our government asks us to do is right." Because UTC's president was Jewish his interlocutors reminded him of Nazi defenses at Nuremberg. His answer; "That was Germany. This is America." To drive home the point about the anti-napalm campaign and shed light on why so many in the anti-war community preferred the Germanic spelling "America" at the time, Franklin reproduces two hideous photos of napalmed Vietnamese used in anti-war flyers. These images may take some readers aback, but because today's youth have little or no conception of the grotesqueries of modern war teachers may want to consider seriously using these in the classroom. Like Brady's Civil War photos, these gruesome pictures bring reality home and may succeed in prompting moral outrage as they did for so many in the 1960s. Franklin's lengthy discussion of the repugnant lengths authorities were willing to go to suppress free speech and shut anti-war activists up is also instructive. The Stanford law student who dropped 250,000 flyers by airplane over downtown Los Angeles and Disneyland depicting a mother and child reduced by napalm to charcoal was arrested and charged with littering. Indeed, Franklin himself was fired from a tenured position at Stanford for "urging and inciting disruption of campus activities" in his efforts to raise consciousness about the war. The committee revoking his tenure said it was unlikely he could be "rehabilitated."

We are fortunate that Franklin did not abandon his scholarly career. Instead, he dug in and continued to teach and write tellingly about Vietnam and the American way of war in general. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies is a worthy addition to his work.

PAUL ATWOOD is a member of the American Studies faculty at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a co-founder of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, where his now a research associate. He specializes in US foreign policy and the interrelations between US culture and foreign policy.