Those Who Have Borne the Battle (34 page)

 

 

In January 1973 the United States and North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords. This provided for the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War. In the following months, the North Vietnamese released 591 American prisoners of war. “Operation Homecoming” was an emotional celebration of men, some of whom had been in the camps for eight years. Not everyone celebrated, for there were still some 2,500 men
listed as missing in action. If this was a smaller number unaccounted for than in previous wars, it remained deeply troubling to their families and to many others. Some Americans feared that the North Vietnamese had kept some prisoners, perhaps in Laos. Wars such as Korea and Vietnam that end with armistices that restrict US access into the battle zones make it difficult to recover remains and investigate the fate of the missing.

This concern about those still missing evolved quickly into a consequential political movement. While conservative groups and extremist fringes made common cause with it, at its core it represented families, friends, and many Vietnam veterans who sought final resolution for the missing. The fact that many of those who were missing were men who were pilots and crew members shot down or crashed over North Vietnam meant that their families were often middle class and educated, with the means to pursue this cause. Sylvester Stallone's
Rambo
and Chuck Norris's
Missing in Action
movies in the 1980s were widely popular accounts of missions to rescue prisoners.

A United States Senate committee in 1993 had extensive hearings and determined that there was no evidence that any Americans were currently held prisoner. John Kerry chaired this committee, joined by Senators John McCain, a former prisoner of war, and Robert Smith, a Vietnam veteran who had been a supporter of the view that there were likely still prisoners.

The findings of this Senate committee did not end the debate. Family members of the missing and their political allies continued to insist that the United States had collaborated with North Vietnam to keep it quiet. Some of them were active in the effort to defeat John McCain in his effort to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, especially in the South Carolina primary—going so far as to suggest he was the “Manchurian Candidate” of this war. They would continue these assaults when he ran in 2008. And these advocates joined others in the full-throated attack on John Kerry's presidential bid in 2004, including the “Swift Boat” campaign that questioned Kerry's own war record and depicted him as a traitor for his antiwar activities in the early 1970s.

The emotions and pain and anger of the Vietnam War remain for many. The POW/MIA flag continues to be widely displayed, if not always
signifying a belief that prisoners remain some forty years later, then affirming a solidarity with those who remain unaccounted for and with their families.
¹⁰⁶

It should not be surprising that these emotions persist for some. They marked the war for many. These tensions followed the ambivalence, uncertainty, and the vague if not misleading promises and commitments that marked the entrance into this war. These are not the foundations on which to send men to fight and die. Vietnam did not fit easily into the narrative of American wars. Neither did Korea, but it was not necessary to confront the disparity in that war since it was less visible. Vietnam was aggressively visible and impossible to ignore. So the narrative adjusted—as did the tale of Vietnam. These elements and the political controversy that followed would continue to track those who served in Vietnam. They still echo.

 

 

 

 

I
N THE SUMMER OF 2003, the United States enjoyed a brief respite from its two newest wars. It was a chance to catch breath and cross fingers. The war in Afghanistan seemed more or less militarily resolved, if uneasily so. Osama bin Laden remained free, and the new Afghan government was still evolving. The war in Iraq too had begun to shift from the brief elation of an accomplished mission and was entering a troubling, perhaps largely unexpected, phase of instability and insurgency.

In July 2003 the British prime minister, Tony Blair, addressed the Congress of the United States. British armed forces had joined those of the United States to fight and die in Afghanistan and Iraq. In his speech, Blair lamented that there had never been a time when “a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day.” He reflected that all of those in the West were “reared on battles between great warriors, between great nations” and that these were decisive fights “for conquest, for land or money,” engaged in by “massed armies.” The current wars were not so simple, and their engagements were seldom so resolute as conflicts of the past.
¹

For a truly relevant warning, Prime Minister Blair might well have turned to one of his eloquent predecessors, Winston Churchill, a man who had likewise wrestled with war and the uncertainty of history. In his recent memoir, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced
his final chapter with a quote from Churchill—one very different from the oft-cited inspiring call to England's “finest hour” in 1940. Ten years before the Battle of Britain, Churchill considered the history of the Second Boer War. He warned, as Secretary Rumsfeld, perhaps ironically, reminds, “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.”
²

In his 1930 book, Churchill reflected deeply on this concern, urging his readers, “Let us learn our lessons.” But Churchill, a student of history, also acknowledged that, alas, history was not an instruction manual. He wrote that history can at best alert us to the fact that the future is not predictable: “The Statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”
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Recently, the distinguished American historian Gordon Wood warned that “if the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life. It ought to produce prudence and humility.”
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In the post-9/11 world, emotions and confidence trumped prudence and humility.

 

 

The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, would have a tremendous impact on the first decade of the twenty-first century. By midmorning of September 11, an iconic and massive commercial center of Lower Manhattan and a section of the Pentagon were destroyed by terrorists who hijacked three passenger jets and murdered the passengers in assaults on symbolic buildings. The remaining ruins of a fourth hijacked jet lay smoldering in a Pennsylvania field. Nearly three thousand were killed that morning.

On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke in Washington at the National Cathedral. There, he vowed, “Our responsibility to history is already clear. To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” A few hours later, the president stood with a bullhorn amid the debris of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. He shouted to the rescue workers and others who joined him at this traumatized site, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
⁵
Few blinked when the president
and other leaders responded to these horrible criminal acts by proclaiming a “war” on terror.

Intelligence reports as well as his own boastful claims confirmed that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group had planned and executed the attacks. This group of Islamic fundamentalists, jihadists, were in the mountains of Afghanistan, protected by the Afghan Taliban government.

On October 7, President Bush announced the beginning of military action against the Taliban and their terrorist tenants. He had ordered significant air strikes against Taliban concentrations, equipment, and troops. Joining with the dissident Afghan Northern Alliance, small contingents of US ground troops, largely Special Forces, along with CIA operatives and UK Special Forces, quickly defeated the Taliban, taking Kabul on November 12 as Taliban soldiers slipped away.

In December among the mountains and deep caves of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan, the western Coalition forces attacked what was presumed to be the base of Bin Laden. He and many members of his group, as well as leadership of the Taliban, managed to flee, and the US government and NATO allies turned to the task of stabilizing the government of pro-Western interim president Hamid Karzai.

Within a week of 9/11, there were reports about members of the Bush administration drawing up war plans for Iraq as well as Afghanistan. On October 12, 2001, as the war in Afghanistan was in its earliest phases, there was a story about a group within the Department of Defense that was organizing the means to move to the “next phase of the war against terrorism”—the ouster of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Called by some critics the “Wolfowitz cabal,” due to the advocacy of such action by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, this planning had the apparent approval of President Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, and Secretary Rumsfeld. Secretary of State Colin Powell was not involved, and most believed he was not supportive at that time of another war that might erode the international support that the United States enjoyed in Afghanistan.
⁶

In the seventeen months following the commencement of military action in Afghanistan, the national—and international—attention shifted increasingly to Iraq. Rumors and speculation escalated to public indictments
of the Iraqi government by senior American officials. Allegations about Saddam Hussein's developing nuclear, chemical, and biological armaments, “weapons of mass destruction,” were seemingly confirmed by his unwillingness to allow free access to UN weapons inspectors. American officials seemed convinced that he had cooperated with the 9/11 terrorists. All of this conditioned the American people to understand the necessity of removing him. Suspicions and allegations shortly became unequivocal statements of fact.

On March 20, 2003, American-led troops, joined by British, Australian, and Polish units, pushed into southern Iraq. On April 9, Baghdad fell and Saddam Hussein went into hiding. On May 1, President Bush proclaimed that the mission in Iraq had been accomplished. There were no weapons of mass destruction found, and Hussein evaded capture until December, when he was taken by American troops from his hiding place, turned over to the provisional Iraqi government, tried, and executed for his role in ordering the deaths of many of his own countrymen.

In late March 2003, just a few days into the war, all reports were filled with optimistic accounts of the effectiveness of American and Coalition military forces and the inconsequential Iraqi resistance. Secretary Rumsfeld had assured
CBS News
viewers on March 23 that “the outcome is clear,” and he had little doubt that the war soon would “be over and Saddam Hussein and his regime will be gone.” On the other hand, some administration officials worried about reports that were too optimistic, for they feared that Americans prematurely would assume the war was over. If it then continued, public confidence and support might erode quickly. President Bush warned, “It's important for the American people to realize that this war has just begun.”
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The president was correct, of course. Even more correct than he had contemplated. Churchill's “unforeseeable and uncontrollable events” would intrude.

As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wound ahead through the decade to become the longest wars in American history, as the number of American military deaths in these wars climbed above sixty-two hundred, as multiple deployments and shifting missions marked the wars, they became more controversial. The history of the Vietnam War just would not stay out of the controversy.

As I have worked to understand better the American perception of the military in these current theaters, I have been intrigued by the wide range of analogies with Vietnam. If those who fought in Vietnam would appropriately hope for more than to become a perpetual negative reference point for politicians and commentators, so those who served in Afghanistan and Iraq have earned more than a tagalong determinism.

Policy makers turn to history perhaps more to rationalize decisions taken than to guide their actions. As we have already noted, in the period following World War II, the Munich analogy provided a framework for describing the need for action in Korea and Vietnam. If the “lesson” was not applied wisely, at least it was commonly understood—unchecked aggression leads to more aggression.

Vietnam is wrapped in multiple “lessons,” ones that relate inconsistently with each other and that sometimes seem to have little relationship to the experience of Vietnam. Two scholars who studied the question of what Vietnam taught concluded in 1985, “The Indochina war was surely the most tragic episode in the history of the United States in this century. If we could all look at that terrible experience through the same pair of eyes, it could teach us much. But we cannot, so it cannot. That may be the final tragedy of the Vietnam war.”
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Just a few years later, Vietnam seemed finally to be in the past, or at least it was declared to be. President George Herbert Walker Bush, following the rapid success of Operation Desert Storm in liberating Kuwait and defeating the Iraqi invaders, proclaimed, “By God, we've licked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” Alas, that proved not to be the case. President Bill Clinton, President Bush's son President George W. Bush, and then President Barack Obama would have to deal with the same burden. In December 2009, nearly two decades after the declaration that the Vietnam syndrome had been “licked,” when President Obama announced a more vigorous military position in Afghanistan, he needed explicitly to assure his audience at the United States Military Academy at West Point that this was not “another Vietnam.” This was not a random analogy but was political defense, for very early in his presidency
Newsweek
had described Afghanistan as “Obama's Vietnam.” Others pointed to this potential if not yet this circumstance.