The Strange Afterlife of the Vietnam War

As the hostilities in Iraq continue, the United States faces the difficult task of defeating a stubborn and violent insurgency. Some Americans today see uncomfortable parallels to America’s lost war in Vietnam. Others believe the differences far outweigh the similarities. In this debate one thing is clear. The Vietnam War is still among the most toxic labels in all of American politics. Although the nation shows due respect for the many military veterans who served in Vietnam, it is still bitterly divided about the policies that got and kept us in Southeast Asia more than a generation ago.

More than thirty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Americans still have not resolved the controversies that surrounded it. With the passing of time, our collective memory of the war has splintered. A bewildering array of movie and television portrayals has sped this process along. Hollywood’s many treatments of the topic have been vivid and at times masterful. More than simple entertainments, however, these fictional accounts in movies and television have helped blur perceptions of the past.

Screen versions of the Vietnam War run the gamut of interpretative perspectives. In the late 1970s, films like Apocalypse Now presented the war as savage madness. During the heyday of Vietnam War movies a decade later, the Rambo and Missing in Action films reinforced Reagan’s view of the war as a “noble cause.” They showed a picture of the war in which America’s leaders undermined the U.S. military’s heroic efforts. Later in that decade, more nuanced and conflicted retellings of the war appeared in movies such as Platoon, Hamburger Hill and Full Metal Jacket. Finally, in 1990s and beyond, movies as varied as Forrest Gump, Heaven and Earth and We Were Soldiers, entertained audiences with still more interpretations of the Vietnam War.

Hollywood’s versions of the Vietnam War continue the long battle for “hearts and minds,” which has been waged nonstop since the early 1960s. This aspect of the U.S. war effort in Vietnam is often cited as the least successful aspect of the conflict. People frequently take this to mean that the U.S. did not do a good job of convincing the Vietnamese people to take more effective action in fighting communist forces. Yet more importantly, it was a fight that was waged and lost in the American homeland. Initial support for the war unraveled by the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and was never regained. Domestic disagreement about the war was deeply polarizing. The military conflict ended in Vietnam in the 1970s, but the battle in American for hearts and minds never did.

Viewers receive a variety of inconsistent messages about the Vietnam War through Hollywood productions. Yet some common themes, which are also fixtures in political rhetoric, do come across. Of these, the theme of American hegemony, not only in politics, but in human experience, is the most obvious. Despite the fact that they look at the war from differing world views, the Vietnam War films almost universally emphasize that the conflict was primarily an American experience. Seldom do the films look at the Vietnamese people or culture. Usually, in fact, Vietnamese people are portrayed in a flat, one-dimensional way. Often, they are shown in stereotyped roles as villains or victims. As dramatis personae, they serve as foils against which American characters can act out their heroism or cowardice. We learn little of them as individuals or as a people.

Americans, too, are often reduced to only a basic dichotomy: the hero-patriot and the coward-villain. Heroes have a duty to perform and must do so with honor. The ultimate screen hero in Vietnam War movies is undoubtedly John Rambo, who in three films spanning the 1980s defeated numerous well-equipped military foes single-handedly. Although few other films went to this extreme, in most the heroism of the American soldier is a central theme. In this respect, the Vietnam War films fall neatly into the long line of Hollywood war films.

Dramatic films of all sorts require conflict, and in war films a pre-determined enemy usually fulfills most of that role. In the Vietnam War movies, however, villains are not confined to the official enemy. Frequently, they are also embodied in misguided, cowardly, or simply evil Americans who undermine the efforts of the heroic soldiers. Oddly, these characters might be morally corrupted government officials or they might be counter-culture anti-war types. The presence of these characters suggests to viewers that American troops faced not one, but two enemies during the war: the communist Vietnamese forces and fellow Americans who undermined their efforts. In this logic, it is only a short step to the conclusion that Americans did not lose the war to a foreign enemy, but instead lost it to themselves.

Indeed, one of the strongest legacies of the Vietnam War is the trauma that Americans felt about losing a war. (Of course, it was not really that simple, since by the time the Saigon government fell in 1975, the U.S. had already signed its own peace accords with North Vietnam and had mostly disengaged from the fighting.) The very idea of this loss has been so anathema to Americans that other explanations needed to be found. The war’s outcome violated the moral framework in which Americans view their nation. It was more comforting to believe that the United States had defeated itself than to believe a small communist nation could inflict such pain on its superpower adversary.

As I report in my book The Afterlife of America’s War in Vietnam, the repeated incarnations of the war in politics and on screen are part of the continuing nation’s efforts to come to terms with disillusionment and disappointments from the conflict. Because of our fractured understanding of how the Vietnam War fits into the American saga, it is a particularly dubious proposition to employ the Vietnam metaphor in current international conflicts. It is difficult to see how using failed consensus about one war as the basis for unity in a new one will have satisfactory results.