Mind of an Outlaw (65 page)

Of course, the jails were another disaster system. The best of them were overcrowded, and there were no budgets for new prisons. If avalanches of new prisoners came along, the only place for them would be camps, guarded by the military.

This was merely a scenario, no more than one more doomsday scenario as long as the economy held. Money could still soothe some crucial margin of every American’s exacerbated feelings. Let the river of money go dry, however, and what would hold the country together? There might be revolts in the ghetto, curfews in the inner cities, and martial law.

It was hard to believe that Bush or any other Republican or Democrat could offer a solution to the real problem, which was that standards of craftsmanship were deteriorating among the American workforce. Our consumer products were not as good as they used to be. The Germans and the Japanese made better cars and better toasters. Their best engineers were working in consumer industries, while ours were being hired by the military-industrial complex. Given the shoddy show, one could blame corporate packaging, advertising, and TV; one could blame hedonism and its hangovers; one could blame drugs, blacks, labor unions; one could blame the Pied Piper. It did not matter whom you blamed. It was multiple choice, and all of the answers might be correct. The fact was that America was mired in grievances, miseries, miscalculations, slave history, and obsessions; the economy was reflecting it.

In fact, Mailer was surprised by himself. Something deep in him—which is to say, no longer censorable—was now saying: “The country needs a purge, a fling, some sacrifice of blood, some waste of the blood of others, some colossal event, a triumph. We need an extravaganza to take us out of ourselves. We are Romans, finally, and there is no moral force left among our citizens to countermand that fact. So this war will be a crucial vacation from the morose state of American affairs. If it succeeds, the country may even be able to face a few real problems again.”

It was, at least, a perspective. A nation’s ego might be not unlike the human ego: when its view of itself was able to lift, there was more human energy available; yes, energy liberated itself best under the aegis of a happy ego. By that logic, America needed to win a war.

On the night in early March when George Bush delivered his victory speech to Congress, he was welcomed with an ovation that rivaled any outpouring of approval Ronald Reagan had received in the same Capitol building—which is no small remark. He had not only won the war, but accomplished it with an astonishingly small loss of American life—a double victory for Bush. When it came to the sacrifice of one’s own countrymen, the president was also a liberal. He had merely altered the slogan to “Virtually no blood for oil,” and there was no more talk of tens of thousands of body bags having been ordered by the Pentagon.

The same could not be said, of course, for the opponent. There were no reliable figures for killed in action among the Iraqis; they may have lost twenty-five thousand, or was it twice that figure? In forty-two days, 88,500 tons of bombs and missiles were dropped or released by U.S. forces, a figure that does not include the combat sorties of the rest of the coalition nor U.S. and allied artillery. The overall tonnage then, one would estimate, came to well over 100,000 tons, more than enough to pulverize the will to fight of the Iraqi soldiers. Saddam Hussein’s mother of all battles had been reduced to the child of submission. Those of his planes which had managed to fly flew, in large
part, to Iran; his tanks were buried deep in sand, yet not deep enough. Heat-seeking missiles blew them up (since metal, it was quickly discovered, held the heat of the desert sun longer at night than the desert that covered it). A considerable portion of his Republican Guards, however, had never been committed to battle and so remained more or less intact for the family of battles that was going to take place in Iraq after the war. George Bush had taken the decision to accept a cease-fire before all of Iraq was left helpless. After all, what would there be in Baghdad then to oppose Iran? Iran in control of an Iraq without Saddam Hussein weighed in the balance as a heavier prospect for America than Saddam still in power with but one lung left.

So, of course, there were ironies. A war without ironies searing enough to brand one’s moral flesh is not a real war. The triumph in the Gulf may in time be characterized by military historians as the massively prepared campaign that turned out to be no more than a technical run-through for war. One mighty coalition executing a brilliant military plan encountered no more than a desert horizon of prisoners who had been waiting for weeks to surrender. A technological Leviathan had overcome a magician of metaphors.

Other ironies followed. We had liberated Kuwait, but it was ecologically mutilated. The restoration during daylight hours of blue sky for black sky was going to cost a fortune—would it prove to be as large as the disbursements on the war itself? Sea life in the Gulf might or might not recover from that oil spill seven or eight times greater than the
Exxon Valdez
disaster. The metaphors of the dark poet had proved dark indeed. Vastly less massive than Hitler on the historic scale, Saddam had been ready nonetheless to revenge himself on the God who had not supported him; Saddam waged fire and destruction against nature. He would pull down the walls of the oil temple. In disaster, Saddam would be awesome. No one inhabiting Kuwait over the next few years would be able to cease thinking of his active vengeance, present in every acrid breath. The wrath of hell was in one’s lungs.

It had taken seven months of sleeping through nightmares for
young American soldiers to find a balance between their morale and their fears. The stiffening of their resolve to be ready to die had turned out in the end to be no more than a gargantuan poker bluff. They may have felt not unequal to those American athletes training for the Olympic Games in 1980, who could not go to Moscow because the Russians had invaded Afghanistan. The Gulf soldiers were now going to live with obsession: What would I have been like in combat if it had turned out to be as bad as the minefields, the burning ditches, the barbed wire, and the fields of fire that I contemplated in my dreams?

That was an obsession to live with for the rest of one’s life. After all, many of these American soldiers had been obliged to put the will to fight together out of no more than a tautology of truisms: we’ve got to get the job done so we can all go home. If they found any higher moral sanction, it doubtless came from admiring the will to work under excruciating conditions that characterizes line play in the National Football League.

Of course, the soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect. This was one campaign the military was not going to lose to the press. So the most interesting war in two decades for Americans was obliged to wag along on TV with talking heads and zoom-aways of fighter planes taking off into the wild-rose yonder of the desert at evening. The Pentagon was the producer of this entertainment, and its ranks were composed of solemn people. They were no part of that consumer economy, now as subtly sleazy as all the half-rented suburban malls; no, the military had not acquired most of the best engineering minds for the last two decades, and then brooded like serious men upon their own faults and shortcomings in Vietnam (first of which was that they had been too obliging to the press), to make the same mistakes again; no, the consumer economy might not show the happiest comparison with the Germans and the Japanese, but the military was prepared to prove that it was now, by far, the finest fighting force on earth.

Military men live within life-missions of pride. Since their activities take place inside the enclaves of national security, part of their ethic is to suffer in silence. Silently, the Pentagon had undergone
the ravages of congressional investigation into why it spent $600 on a toilet seat for one airplane and $1,600 on a wrench for another; the military had had to live with the general public cognition that the B-2 Stealth bomber was a monumentally expensive disappointment. All the while, the generals were obliged to keep silent with the knowledge that if all else in America might be getting worse, they were getting better.

How could George Bush not turn them loose? They were what we had to show for the Reagan years. From 1980 to 1988, the Pied Piper had spent $2.1 trillion on the military—which is four times the amount of the S&L scandal. Maybe we couldn’t make cars and toasters anymore, but we had forced the Russians to spend, over these same eight years, $2.3 trillion, $200 billion more than ourselves, and the Soviets couldn’t afford it at all. They couldn’t even make decent soap.

The military, wounded by the shame of Vietnam and fortified by the budget, had become a superior fighting force as a corollary to the main Reagan strategy, which had been to wreck the Russians economically. In that, we succeeded, but at the cost of handing over economic hegemony in the world to Germany and Japan while we enlarged the list of our unsolvable crises in the cities.

Now that the Soviet Union had folded as a foe, all we had to show was the state-of-the-art strengths of our forces. So George Bush used them the first chance he had. The technological display was full of stardust. The F-117A Stealth fighter with its laser-guided bombs hit 95 percent of its targets. In numbers, it was only 2.5 percent of the U.S. aircraft, but it managed to account for 31 percent of the successful hits on its first day. Endless nuggets of such sparkling statistics were now floating about in the vitreous fluid of the media. Yes, the air war, discounting delays from bad weather and ignoring all lack of opposition, had been a massive success; the deep, if natural, fear of the Bush administration and the Pentagon that the ground troops might not be well motivated enough to fight the Iraqis did not have to be tested. George Bush had gone up to the great dentist in the sky, but none of his teeth had been pulled. We had probably dumped
some amount like 200 million pounds of explosive on Iraq and Kuwait, and that came down to 10 pounds virtually per person for all of 21 million people. Of course, the bombs and rockets had not been directed against people, but all the same, the Pentagon was not releasing the figures. Those tonnages could yet take on the long shadows of overkill. The country preferred instead to enjoy the victory.

In an appearance before state legislators at the White House in March, George Bush went so far as to suggest that the ghosts of Vietnam had been exorcised, and the shame of the past had been overcome. The misery of losing a war to a Third World power could be forgotten. Our great win in the Gulf could replace our obsession with Southeast Asia.

George Bush, however, might encounter some subtle troubles with his thesis in time to come. If the nation was going to enjoy the fruits of victory, which is to say a strengthening of the national ego that, one hoped, would be able to produce a new vigor for tackling our problems, then maybe the war in Vietnam ought not to be exorcised so quickly. The president was, after all, getting into the same slough of muddy reasoning as the liberals. They had decided in advance that the Gulf War was a repetition of Vietnam, and that had been a perfect example of American thinking at its most simplistic. Now the Bush administration was going to run with the same errors around the other end of the ideological line. When you got down to it, the only similarity between the two wars was that America had been in both of them. One, after all, had been combat waged in the jungle, and the canopy offered concealment to ground troops from planes and much-restricted access to tanks. Soldiers encountered one another face-to-face in deep shadows. In the Gulf, war had been fought in the open vistas of the desert against a mad poet who was hated by all too many of his own troops. In Vietnam, we were allied against a people ready to die for a leader who not only looked like a saint but embodied the travails of a long-delayed liberation. He offered the idea that their deaths would not be in vain, and that a more humane world would follow for their children. The Democrats had kept the war in Southeast Asia going
eight years beyond its time, and then Nixon kept it going for another six, and by the time we left Saigon, there was no future left for anyone over there. Two million Vietnamese had been killed, and the cadres of power-for-its-own-sake filled the gap. More than a million new deaths would follow in Cambodia, and oppression was everywhere.

Of course, we had a bad conscience concerning Vietnam. It was part of the national honor to remind ourselves that we, a great and democratic nation, had been capable of monstrous deeds. It revealed to us that America might never come to maturity, nor develop a culture rich enough and sufficiently resonant to counterbalance our technology. No, we might end as computer hacks and body louts—the last superlouts in the history of the world—but if we had a national conscience, and it would yet prevail, then we were obliged to live with Vietnam and keep measuring the cost. Bury the ghosts of that war too soon and the last irony of the desert sands would be released. That great news machine, which eats our history as fast as it is created, might even move so fast that our power to enjoy the success of the war in the Gulf could also be covered over prematurely and we could lose whatever good it was going to do our long-bruised view of ourselves. While it was a war that might yet make a difference for good or for ill in the tangled nests of the Middle East, it might also turn out to be no more than its own weight, a military exercise on a colossal level, panoramas of technical virtuosity in a moral thicket, and if that was all it was, then the news machine would damn sure eat it. The memory of Vietnam, however, is not going to disappear. Vietnam is embedded in our moral history.

Of course, before the Gulf War can even show a tendency to disappear, our commander in chief is going to bring it back. George Bush has promised to remind us of its existence and what we owe the people who fought in it. He will have a special celebration for our returning veterans as soon as this coming Fourth of July.

On that occasion, he will remind us of his war. He will. He will.