A Monumental Error

I love the Vietnam War Memorial because it doesn’t look like a DC monument. It is a stone depression that doesn’t soar, it is black marble that radiates thoughtfulness rather than airy ambition, and, rather than a blithe salute to an unknown soldier, it lists all 58,000 of the Americans who died in Vietnam, the name of every one lasered into stone.  The dead at the Vietnam War Memorial are men like David Francis Abbott, Charles George Haas and Lamond Joseph Jackson, to name just three.  The Vietnam War Memorial is about absence, about death, about the struggle to find meaning out of these losses.  Which is as it should be.

Maya Lin’s design is especially appropriate for the Vietnam War, probably the least popular war in American history.  The 1960s and the early 1970s are now recalled as times of civil rights gains for blacks and women and for a now-quaint experimentation with relatively non-lethal drugs.  But most of the protests, bombings, and arrests of the time were over the Vietnam War that ultimately killed about one in 200 of the American men born in the decade after World War II.  Many more were maimed physically or psychologically.

A view developed over the late 1970s and 1980s that the war was a terrible mistake, or worse, that it had been deliberately foisted on the American public by a military-industrial elite that knew all along that there was no chance that America could win.  It was also viewed as a war in which American soldiers didn’t perform well, either - most prominently in the My Lai massacre in which American soldiers led by William Calley murdered the residents of a Vietnamese village they suspected of harboring enemy soldiers.  These ideas arose from The Pentagon Papers and from the work of journalists like David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, but they soon found voice in movies like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, or Platoon, all films in which drafted soldiers were fed into jungle warfare for no apparent purpose.

It was not really a consensus view, however, as that cynical perspective was disproportionately held in what we might today call the coastal elites  Vietnam was instead viewed as a heroic mission by much of small-town white America, particularly those who had sent a disproportionate share of their young men to Vietnam, many of them to die, while their coastal elite equivalents found ways to shield their sons from service and then to impugn the sacrifice of their own sons who did serve and die in Vietnam.  Some of that resentment centered around the elite’s treatment of Calley, a junior college graduate from Florida, who southern governors (including Jimmy Carter) said was treated unfairly.  It was extremely galling - and it still is - to these people that the sacrifices made by their families got so little respect.  Be careful of how you talk to seventy-year old men about Vietnam.

My own view of these tensions is that both sides have a point.  I think that the Vietnam War was a horrible mistake.  American leadership of the time - both Republican and Democratic - had come to view all foreign civil wars as part of a struggle for world control between democracy and communism.  (Contra Oliver Stone,I think it’s a myth that Kennedy would have kept us out of the war.)  They weren’t totally wrong, either, as the Soviet Union, in particular, was a vicious suppressor of democracy in Eastern Europe and beyond.  But in the case of Vietnam - and often elsewhere as well -  the American government mistakenly shoehorned local civil wars into its worldwide struggle.  

This is particularly true in Vietnam.  Vietnam was a French colony at the start of World War II, was quickly ceded to Japan in 1940 by a panicked Vichy regime, and then handed back at the end of World War II to a France eager to rekindle its colonial glory.  The Vietnamese - some of whom were in fact communists - didn’t want the French back, in part because any illusions they had of Europeans’ intrinsic superiority had been destroyed by Japan’s easy victories over the French, British, Dutch, and, for a while, American empires of the Pacific.

Its own dabbling in colonialism in the Philippines notwithstanding, the United States had taken a dim view of European attempts to reassert their empires in the years immediately before and after 1945.  On his world tour in 1942 on behalf of Roosevelt, for example, Republican Wendell Willkie repeatedly clashed with Churchill and other Europeans eager to reassert their colonial authority after the war - this was not why the U.S. was fighting the war, said Willkie.  But as the cold war heated up in the years after 1945, the United States tended to see these colonial wars as the front line of its struggle with the Soviet Union.  These American anxieties were heightened by the Chinese Communists’ 1949 victory and by North Korea’s China-assisted attempt to take over South Korea, the part that had been partitioned off from the North after WWII.  These were of course the times of the red scare and Mccarthyism, overzealous responses to a real threat.  

I now view the French struggle with Vietnamese resistance, which ended with France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and with its following withdrawal, as the defeat of an arrogant colonial power by a virtuous liberation movement.  But I have some sympathy for how that looked to American policymakers for the next twenty years, much of it taken up by American attempts to defeat the communists in Hanoi (who had popular support) and to prop up the corrupt Catholic regime in Saigon (which didn’t).  Their perceptions were so distorted, so filtered through a cold war lens, that they failed to see that the North Vietnamese were nobody’s puppet, neither China nor the Soviet Union.  It’s a real tragedy, in my view, that so many American men died in Vietnam for a fight that didn’t, in retrospect, need to be fought.  So while I think the Vietnam protesters were correct - it was a foolish war - I have more sympathy than they did for the decision making processes of those who supported the war.

Memories of the Vietnam War are also affected by disparate views on who served in the war.  There was a draft during much of the war, in which randomly chosen birthdays were chosen to determine who was dismissed from service and who wasn’t.  There was much concern at the time that ambitious, well-connected young men - like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush - found ways to avoid service, and there is some truth to this.  This has led some observers to scorn the Vietnam War as not only externally unjust - we were the bad guys perpetuating a new form of colonialism - but also internally unjust as well.

Some families of Vietnam War dead find this view offensive as well, thinking that it demeans their sacrifice.  It is true that those who served in Vietnam were less well off than average, but it is also true that those actually killed in Vietnam service were not particularly poor, on average. Careful analysis has shown that many sons of well-off families died in Vietnam….they just happened to be kids who were in ROTC at the University of Georgia, for example, rather than literature majors at Harvard.  A Harvard-trained journalist like James Fallows could lament the lower-class nature of the soldiers he saw, but that’s the problem with going to Harvard - everyone else looks like a peon.

Lin’s design threads the needle between those who didn’t want to commemorate Vietnam at all and those who wanted to mourn the dead.  The design was initially rejected by many of the latter - the families of those UGA ROTC students - because they didn’t see it as heroic enough, that it didn’t indicate that the losses were for any specific cause.  The black marble mocks any meaning other than grief and remembrance.  But, over time, those supporters of the war, the families of the dead, came to love it, to see it as an appropriate way to acknowledge the specifics of the dead, with their name, etched in stone as if on a grave, but out there in a very public place that millions of people walk by each year.  They came to develop emotional attachments to the memorial, to come from all over the country to cry, to take etchings of their loved one’s names, and to walk by with an American flag in their hand.  It’s what a war memorial should be.

There were various memorials to WWII soldiers around DC - Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Omar Bradley, for example - but there was no single WWII memorial at the time of the construction of the Vietnam Memorial.  As World War II veterans continued to die off in the 1990s and as the Vietnam Memorial came to be appreciated as something that pleased almost everyone, Congress and the Clinton administration decided that something similar needed to be done for World War II, which was of course a larger and bloodier war.   Unfortunately, they built a memorial that had learned none of the lessons of the Vietnam War Memorial.

The World War II memorial has been criticized for two reasons.  The first reason - accurate but ultimately less important - is that it obstructs the long view along the Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.  The second - and more important reason - is that it’s terrible.  You can look online for a more precise idea of what it looks like, but the World War II memorial is a circular fountain rimmed by 56 individual monuments - one for each of the states and territories (e.g., Puerto Rico) that contributed soldiers to the War.  There are also eagles, wreaths, arches that echo Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and platitudes about paying the price for freedom. Critics have correctly noted that it could have been designed by Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect.  There’s a picture from 1940 of Hitler looking down on Napoleon’s tomb, sharing a moment, as it were, with his fellow megalomaniac.  They’d both like the WWII Memorial.

You might say that WWII deserved a heroic monument whereas Vietnam did not.  WWII was the good war, we say, the war in which our adversaries - including Japan - were brutal and genocidal…..and I think that’s mostly true.  But war is war, good or bad, and there are plenty of sickening features of WWII, too, on the American side - our overuse of civilian bombing in both Germany and Japan, our interning of Japanese-Americans (and some German-Americans, too), and our alliance with the genocidal Soviet Union.  But it’s also what it did to ourselves.  The types of military incompetence it uncovered - e.g., Pearl Harbor and Slapton Sands, the suppression of free speech, and the general coarsening of attitudes, perhaps best exemplified by the fact that it was possible for a mainstream magazine to publish approvingly a picture of an American woman gazing at a Japanese skull that had been sent to her by her boyfriend in the Pacific.  Or, you could note that one of the most popular songs of the war was “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” We often say that the Vietnam War was a bad war and WWII a good one, but they were both terrible.

The World War II Memorial is dangerous because it encourages Americans to think that there are good wars out there, when in fact all there only exist bloody wars, some better and more necessary than others, but all a dreadful waste of young men. While I don’t like the World War II Memorial, I do like what George W. Bush said in 2004 at its dedication.  His speech focused less on heroism and high purpose and more on the dead, the widows, and the orphans.  “Our boys weren't exactly angels,” he said. “They were flesh and blood, with all the limits and fears of flesh and blood.”

Bush went on to quote Ernie Pyle, the journalist who lived and died with the GIs and whose reporting honestly depicted the lives of enlisted men.  Pyle wrote "of tired and dirty soldiers, who are alive and don't want to die; of long, darkened convoys in the middle of the night; of shocked, silent men wandering back down the hill from battle; of Jeeps and petrol dumps and smelly bedding roles and C-rations; and blown bridges and dead mules and hospital tents and shirt collars greasy-black from months of wearing; and of laughter, too, and anger, and wine, and lovely flowers and constant cussing. All these, it is composed of; and of graves and graves and graves."

I feel that, in its way, the Vietnam War Memorial is the real memorial for World War II. It captures Pyle’s “graves and graves and graves,” though to do World War II justice would require a much longer wall.  Even it, however, is inadequate, in that it misses the details painted by Pyle, of the dead mules, the greasy shirts, the fear, and of course the laughter and the swearing.  But it’s probably too much to ask of a memorial to capture all those things - that’s a job for literature.  So maybe the real monuments to World War II are books like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.  Or maybe it would be better to just recite a few of those dead soldiers whose names didn’t make it onto the World War II memorial.  Yes, that’s better, and so here are a few names of men from the District of Columbia, an arbitrarily chosen state, who were killed in the war - Frank Aquilino, Kensey J. Hampton, and Willis O. Moore.