Teaching the Vietnam War in a Time of War
The most common analogy made between Vietnam and Iraq is topographic: Vietnam was/Iraq is a quagmire. At a press conference in the summer of 2003, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld had a hard time with the word. He had opened with an analogy of his own, comparing the growing insurgency in Iraq to, of all things, the situation in the U.S. immediately after the American Revolution. “There was rampant inflation and no stable currency. Discontent led to uprisings, such as Shays' Rebellion, with mobs attacking courthouses and government buildings…" He added that the “transition to democracy is never easy” and seemed unaware or indifferent to the logic of his analogy which left American troops in Iraq in a rather anomalous situation. A reporter wanted to know whether the Iraqi resistance could be called a guerrilla war and whether the U.S. might not have landed itself in a quagmire. Rumsfeld flatly replied that it was not a guerrilla war. As for “Quagmire. We have had several quagmires that weren’t thus far… Why don’t I think it is one? Well, I opened my remarks today about the United States of America. Were we in a quagmire for eight years? I would think not. We were in a process. We were…evolving from a monarchy into a democracy. If you want to call that a quagmire, do it. I don’t.” So there.
The locus classicus of the term “quagmire” seems to have been David Halberstam’s 1964 book, The Making of a Quagmire and what he took quagmire to mean was that the U.S. was somehow caught in situation not of its own making, a swamp that was dragging it down to destruction and from which it could not seem to extricate itself. In his book, The End of Victory Culture, Tom Engelhardt reflected on how the word functioned in the Vietnam war. “For Americans,” Engelhardt wrote, “the benefit of the word quagmire was that it ruled out the possibility that the U.S. had committed acts of planned aggression. The image turned Vietnam into the aggressor….” If Vietnam was a quagmire; if Iraq is a quagmire, then Americans, not Vietnamese or Iraqis, are the victims of war.
A subset of the quagmire analogy is the notion that, however terrible the situation, the U.S. cannot leave. In the case of Vietnam, the prediction was that the departure of U.S. troops would lead to a bloodbath. In Iraq the language is no less sanguine. Politicians and journalists insist the U.S. must remain to set things right. Having broken Iraq, as Secretary of State Powell famously warned, the U.S. has now bought it. A class on Vietnam must examine closely exactly what the bloodbath argument entailed, its logic, its relation to the military and political situation at the time. As for Iraq, I think the British reporter Simon Jenkins put it best: "No statement about Iraq is more absurd than that 'we must stay to finish the job.' What job? A dozen more Fallujahs? The thesis that leaving Iraq would plunge it into anarchy and warlordism defies the facts on the ground.”
Along with analogies, there has been a wholesale reappearance of what one could call Vietnam-era key words and phrases: hearts and minds, friend from foe, political versus military solutions, destroying the town to save it. There are, as yet, no free-fire zones in Iraq. But there are “weapons free” zones, which does not mean what the words imply - an area in which weapons are absent - but rather one in which weapons can be used on anything that moves.
The appeal to direct combat experience continues to characterize much of the writing on Vietnam (and to tempt many men, among them mature historians, to claim Vietnam service they never performed). What, exactly, do troops on the ground experience? Chatting recently with a filmmaker and a freelance writer, two American soldiers passed around their digital pictures of dead Iraqis and commented on them: “These guys shot at some of our guys, so we lit ‘em up.” Two died and the third lived. “His buddy was crying like a baby. Just sitting there bawling with his friend’s brains and skull fragments all over his face. One of our guys came up to him and is like: Hey! No crying in baseball.” The soldiers acknowledge the humor is sick but “humor is the only way you can deal with this shit.” The reporter insists, (hopefully? defensively?) that below the humor is rage. As in Vietnam, the target of that rage is not government policy but rather the people to whose country the American soldiers have been sent.
Thomas Friedman advised his readers to “gauge Iraq” by listening to the soldiers. “Readers regularly ask me when I will throw in the towel on Iraq,” Friedman wrote. “I will be guided by the U.S. Army and Marine grunts on the ground. They see Iraq close up. Most of those you talk to are so uncynical - so convinced that we are doing good and doing right, even though they too are unsure it will work. When a majority of those grunts tell us that they are no longer willing to risk their lives to go out and fix the sewers in Sadr City…then you can stick a fork in this one. But so far, we ain’t there yet. The troops are still pretty positive.” He seems not to have spoken with Corporal Daniel Planalp, one of many soldiers who have complained to reporters that they do not know why they are there. “This is Vietnam. I don’t even know why we’re over here fighting. We’re fighting for survival. The Iraqis don’t want us here. If they wanted us here, they’d help us.”
Let me end on another soldier’s statement, published in the New York Times on Memorial Day 2004. On March 18 of last year, Sgt. Christopher Potts, 38, of Tiverton R.I. wrote to his wife describing his journey from Kuwait into Iraq: “The first leg of the trip through the desert was really bad. There were children of all ages from God knows where begging for food and water. The dust was blowing all over them, and some had torn outgrown clothes, and some were barefoot. I looked over at my driver and we were both crying after a few miles. I said to him, You know, this is why I’m here, so that my kids won’t ever have to live like that. Then we just drove in silence for a while.” Sgt. Potts was killed on Oct. 3, 2004.
Sgt. Potts believed what the government wished him to believe - what John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Milhous Nixon all wanted the men they sent to war to believe: that somehow, by killing people over there, they would protect us, over here. How Sgt. Potts came to believe what he did and what its relation might be to the reasons his government sent him to kill and be killed is what we and our students need to understand better. This task is the more urgent in that it just may be that Sgt. Potts got it right: that the national interest as currently defined by the country’s leaders, does require Sgt. Potts to kill and to die in Iraq.Related Links
Stephen J. Morris: We Could Have Won the Vietnam War
This article was published originally by Historians Against the War (HAW) and is reprinted with permission.
Related Links:
- HNN Index: Iraq Analogies: Vietnam, Algeria, etc
- Jonathan Dresner:"Attempting Analogy: Japanese Manchuria and Occupied Iraq"
- John Dower:"Is the U.S. Repeating the Mistakes of Japan in the 1930s?"
- Peter Kirstein:"Why Iraq, Like Vietnam, Is Immoral and Unnecessary"
- Robert Brent Toplin:"Why Is Opposition to the War in Iraq Seemingly So Muted (Compared with Vietnam?)"
- etc., etc.,