Air University Review, March-April 1980

O TEMPORA!
O MORES!

FOR anyone who was graduated from college, as I was, in 1968, reading, writing, or conversing about the Vietnam War will engender some pain. When confronted with inordinate suffering and grief, the human mind seeks to blot it out; the psychological defense mechanism of denial--which performs its mental safety function almost like a fuse box performs its electrical safety function--is occasionally invoked to screen out unpleasant reminiscences. Rather like a man driven to understand what motivated him to do some deed which, later, he judges as odious, so now does the American nation struggle to comprehend the recent awful chapter of its history. It is odd that, regardless of their judgments about the valor or the viciousness of the war, students of the Vietnam conflict can say, in one voice: "Alas for those times! Alas for those morals!"

My college roommate of three years, who was a self-proclaimed Marxist. revolutionary (albeit a rather tranquil one), often bitterly debated me about the war which we both followed in the pages of the New York Times. When last I saw him, a year after our college graduation, he served as an usher at my wedding: My more recent friends were then amazed at this rather unkempt attendant; his more recent friends were then amazed that he would attend the wedding of one being married in the dress blues of an Army officer. My roommate was "counterculture"; I was "establishment." In the ornithological argot of the day, he was the dove, and I was the hawk. Our conversations a decade ago were strained, if civil. We were to correspond once, five years later, and not at all subsequently. I think that only those who have been college roommates for three or four years can appreciate how firm and fast a friendship can result from two people's sharing the imagined (and the real) joys and sorrows of young adulthood in college. Odd that so fast a friendship could be shattered by the vagaries of an American foreign policy. Yet we were hardly alone.

Strange, isn't it, that the "Lost Generation" used to mean post-World War I youth. It is peculiar, too, that my roommate and I both thought ourselves moral: I, for joining the Army; he, for resisting. If we were at all typical of the Lost Generation that was graduated from college about 1968 (and I think that we were more "typical" than either of us has ever understood), it is little wonder that the American nation now struggles so hard to understand the suffering that caused or accompanied or resulted from that congeries of events subsumed so neatly under the simple heading "Vietnam." The ancient Greeks enjoined us to know ourselves; such knowledge, they said, was the origin of wisdom. They never told us that knowing ourselves was so hard.

The recent American Lost Generation is schizophrenic. Some of us are realists and understand what we perceive as the limitations of the human condition; others among us are idealists and understand what we perceive as the potential of the human condition. Of the hundreds of articles, books, and films that I have seen about Vietnam, only a precious few recognize the Aeschylean truth about the genuinely serious youth-orthodox or otherwise-of the new Lost Generation: We all thought ourselves ethical and moral; and we all thought that the others were obtuse or barbarous. And the negotiator is not yet born who can reconcile two factions, each of which claims ethical purity for itself and asserts ethical odium for its opponents.

There are, .of course, some converts. Some of the more rabid "antiestablishmentarians" have joined the system--to change it from within, they say. Their fellows know better. The old yippies, some of them, have "sold out" or, it seems, have recognized that the country is not quite as debauched in 1979 as it was thought to be a decade or so ago. Besides, their eight-year-old kids expect to go to college, and even alumni yippies want a summer vacation. Among the "hawks," some have come to revile their own actions and apologize for having worn a uniform or for having followed orders.

Still, many of the "protesters" continue their "crusade," perhaps now along different lines; and many of the self-styled "patriots" continue their "commitment," perhaps to different causes. There is nuclear power and South Africa, for example; and there is the Russian threat and, to be sure, promotion up a notch from junior executive, from captain, from assistant professor.

So many of us still cannot talk with one another. For some, the war in Vietnam was as stupid or as immoral. as ever; for others, the war in Vietnam, perhaps more now than ever before, can be seen as purposeful and as moral. We who saw things so differently ten years ago still see things similarly now. Perhaps it is because, having made an intellectual commitment in our youth or having accepted a vantage point then, we now find that we lack the mental vigor or the moral courage to speak those awful words, "I was wrong." Lessons of Vietnam--they are there for everyone to learn, if only to fortify an already crenellated position.¹ Ask the debaters about the domino theory; about the Southeast Asian bloodbath; about Vietnamese expansionism; about Chinese geopolitical patrimony; about the global balance of power; about collective security--and you will find to your consternation that the answers which we of the Lost Generation provide, depending on our decennial beliefs, will result in your thinking that we are talking about different wars! We cannot agree on the outcome of the war--in part because we cannot even agree on when it started--whose "fault" the war was, whether the circumstances surrounding the American commitment in force in 1964 justified that commitment, or who "won" the war. As in schizophrenia, we of the Lost Generation have two dissociated personalities. And the historian is not yet born who can reconcile two factions, each of which claims diplomatic or military omniscience for itself and asserts diplomatic or military malefaction on the part of its opponents.

I HAD intended to provide a rather routine review of the books provided me until I recognized--chastened--that, with only rare exceptions, we of the Lost Generation still read and see things through the ideological spectacles we prescribed for ourselves a decade ago. Small wonder, then, that Ira C. Eaker, who is a retired three-star Air Force officer, would say of Admiral Ulysses S. G. Sharp's book* that it "is the best book I have read on [the Vietnam] conflict."² General Eaker has a point. (Here, I can almost hear myoid roommate saying, "Of course you would agree with Eaker! After all, you were in the Army.") He argues, I think convincingly, that the United States simply forgot the lessons we paid for with blood during the Korean War. The United States, he asserts, failed to marshal its military power to support effectively its diplomacy during the Vietnam War. This is all true enough, but where Admiral Sharp takes a wrong turn is in arguing that

*Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, Strategy for Defeat (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1978), 311 pages. No price indicated.

I am decrying the supposition-shown nowhere more vividly than in the mishandling of the air war-that somehow military strategy and tactics can be orchestrated to satisfy all manner of political limitations. It is a supposition as incredible as it is illogical and dangerous. The aims or objectives of an international political strategy may quite reasonably and legitimately be limited, as were ours in Vietnam, but the actual application of military force required to achieve those aims cannot and must not be tactically limited. Our civilian leadership has the awesome task of deciding when the United States should resort to armed force to gain its objectives, limited or otherwise. Once the decision has been made to wage war, that leadership must permit the war to be engaged expeditiously and full bore, not halfway. (p. 270)

The late John Foster Dulles, dead twenty years, would be amazed to find that the idea of massive retaliation still finds favor in some quarters. The late General MacArthur, dead fifteen years, would be amazed to find that the idea of "no substitute for victory" incidentally, a chapter title in Westmoreland's A Soldier Reports--still finds favor in some quarters. No wonder that Bernard Brodie calls Sharp "one of the most pronounced hawks of the Vietnam War."⁸ Like Westmoreland, Sharp was intimately involved in a limited, political "Clausewitzian" war whose nature seems wholly to have escaped him. "The most powerful country in the world," Admiral Sharp argues, "did not have the will power needed to meet the situation." Thus does he blithely ignore not only international politics but the domestic political exigencies which, after all, are at the heart of our republican form of government. Sharp's quarrel is not with Presidents Johnson or Nixon but with the American people and with the American political process.

My old roommate would doubtless dismiss Sharp as a jingo and would thus miss the admiral's reasoned points about the intimacy that exists between military power and diplomatic purpose and about the American loss of the Korean lessons. (pp. 156, 239) Yet Sharp's supporters, among them General Eaker, ignore the Clausewitzian lesson that diplomacy does not end with the onset of war and that politics is the purpose for which wars are fought. The day of the crusade is over.

AMONG the hundreds of books about Vietnam, which while offering little of long-term scholarly significance nevertheless permit one to taste something of the terrible human drama of Vietnam, is that by Alan Dawson, a reporter who watched the 1975 fall of Saigon. His book* is sensitive and well-written but contains very little that is new to the close student of the Vietnam War. Dawson is probably correct that "the tragedy and treachery of the evacuation of Saigon will be told for years. There is no indication; however, that any but a handful of U.S. officials learned any lessons." (n. 339) Dawson's portraits of Thieu, Graham Martin, and a number of other protagonists in the final drama are worth reading--as is his moving account of the March 1975 Convoy of Tears from the Central Highlands--but the book will add little to historical scholarship.

*Alan Dawson, 55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1977, $12.50), 366 pages.

A similar judgment can be made about Allan Millett's work,* which is a collection of twelve essays, all of which appeared in the Washington Post. If one enjoys this kind of Procrustean collection, the book is all right and perhaps would be useful for reference libraries. The essays are of varying quality, and this is not the place to attempt to review them. It may be enough to record here that this is a serious collection-including pieces by such writers as Laurence Stern, Charles C. Moskos, and Ward just-but it suffers the same handicap (and the same eventual oblivion) that most anthologies endure.

*Allan R. Millett, ed., A Short History of the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978, $3.95), 169 pages.

I RARELY extol books, perhaps because of sheer professional jealousy. Yet I must depart from my normal practice now in order to mention what I regard as the finest book about America in Vietnam that I have yet read. My roommate, I am sure, would argue that Guenter Lewy's book is a meretricious effort to justify American involvement in Southeast Asia -an involvement once termed "an obscenity" by a linguistics professor given to such olympian assessments. It is difficult for me to review Lewy's book without sounding as if I want to write the dust jacket for it. But it is simply an extraordinarily scholarly and pellucid treatment of the American experience in Vietnam. The book is remarkably free of the left- and right-wing histrionics that characterize so many books, articles, and films about Vietnam. Lewy's book is an academic gem; it deserves wide circulation and close attention. At the risk of sounding simply obsequious, I must say that this work t is the measure against which other Vietnam books should now be judged. Lewy argues that "the sense of guilt created by the Vietnam war in the minds of many Americans is not warranted and. . . the charges of officially condoned illegal and grossly immoral conduct are without substance." (p. vii) Lewy is no apologist for Westmoreland; neither is he a soi-disant chauvinist who is unalterably proud of all American deeds in Vietnam: "If the American record is not one of gross illegality, neither has it been a model of observance of the law of war. " (p. 268) He argues that the charge of genocide against the United States is "absurd" (p. 301) and that the bombing of North Vietnam "conformed to international law, and the application of American air power was probably the most restrained in modern warfare." (p. 416)

*Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, $19.95), 540 pages.

Lewy perhaps would agree that the recent Lost Generation Was unique in its arrogance about things "academic." My roommate used to inform me, rather peremptorily, that I simply did not understand the sociology of Southeast Asia. (He was quite right.) I used to inform him, as if I were the expert, that he understood practically nothing of the exigencies of statecraft. (I was right!) As Lewy puts it, about a decade ago: "Everyone--from clergyman and biologist to movie actor and pediatrician--could become an instant expert on international law, Southeast Asia, and foreign policy generally." He contends that "professors who would never have dared treat their own disciplines in such a cavalier fashion proclaimed with assurance solutions to the Vietnam problem at 'teach-ins,' complete with folk singers, mime troupes and other forms of entertainment." (p. 435) Lewy's book is a most valuable sGholarly work yet one which is a readable and vital effort. Soldiers and scholars alike will want to read this book and have it on their shelves. Even at its inflated asking price, it is well worth the investment.

In time, perhaps, the Lost Generation of about 1968 will find on another again. Perhaps all of us would do well to learn, with Paul, that we know only in part, for "we see now through a glass, darkly" (I Cor. 13:12). Some of us children of 1968 judge events by consequences, hard as they are to predict or even to assess after the fact; others of us judge events by intentions, hard as they are to evaluate. Unfortunately, human beings lack the desideratum of prescience. I think Lewy says it best, and it merits quotation:

Just as the success of a policy does not prove that it was the only possible successful course of action, a policy can be Correct even if for a variety of reasons it fails. The commitment to South Vietnam was made by intelligent and reasonable men who tackled an intractable problem in the face of great uncertainties, including the future performance of an ally and the actions and reactions of an enemy. The fact that some of their judgments in retrospect can be shown to have been flawed and that the outcome has been a fiasco does not make them villains or fools. If Hitler in 1940 had succeeded in conquering Britain, this would not have proven wrong Churchill's belief in the possibility and moral worth of resistance to the Nazis. Policymakers always have to act on uncertain assumptions and inadequate information, and some of the noblest decisions in history have involved great risks. As long as there exists a reasonable expectation of success, the statesman who fails can perhaps be pitied, but he should not be condemned. (pp. 440-41)

So many of the Lost Generation of a decade ago acted nobly-out of the deepest convictions of their minds and hearts -that, if on that account only, perhaps there are grounds for partial reconciliation. If, like Socrates, one acts on the counsel of his own wisdom and is yet willing to pay the social price therefor (and one is reminded of the late Dr. Martin Luther King's moving 1963 letter from his Birmingham jail cell), cannot he or she not be accepted as patriot? In Paul's letter alluded to earlier, he tells us that, of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the last is the greatest. After the dreadful chapter of our history over which President Lincoln presided from 1861 to 1865, he counseled charity, too, in the effort to bind up the nation's wounds. One wonders if all the thousands of alienated old college roommates have in them anything that is Pauline or Lincolnesque. That way lies understanding-and reconciliation.

The old friends so torn by a conflict that rages yet may find counsel and consolation in Matthew Arnold's classic "Dover Beach":

...let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams.
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Notes

1. See, for example, W. E. Vinacke and R. B. Zajonc, "Thinking," in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, XV, p. 608.

2. Air Force Times, 27 November 1978.

3. Bernard Brodie, War and Politics (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1973), p. 216n.

James H. Toner (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is Assistant Professor of Government at Norwich University and a fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. He was an assistant professor at Notre Dame, where he taught international relations. Dr. Toner served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1972. In 1973, he was selected as a General Douglas MacArthur Statesman Scholar. His articles and reviews have appeared in Army, Military Review, Review of Politics, International Review of History and Political Science, and Naval War College Review.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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