Vietnam Syndrome lingers in US

WASHINGTON - At A time when many of his peers were going out of their way to wriggle out of the Vietnam War draft, Mr Robert Weidman did something unusual: He volunteered for the military.

As a student in the 1960s, he had a college deferment from the military draft, but he decided to sign up anyway.

"I felt like the country had given me choices and I felt that if I was going to reap the fruit of those choices, I should give something back," said Mr Weidman, now 68, who left university in 1969 to serve one tour in Vietnam as a medical officer.

Despite his apparent patriotism and willingness to be sent to the front line, Mr Weidman stressed that he never supported the war.

The two, he said, should not be conflated. In fact, he told The Straits Times he was against it by the time he was called up to go overseas.

"It became clear to me even before I ever went over there that it was a strategic mistake. But it is what it is. You do what your country asks of you."

This clash - between disdain for the war they were sent to fight and love of country - is a reflection of the often-conflicted legacy the war has left in the US.

When Americans talk about the Vietnam War today - 40 years after its end - inevitably they display a mixture of shame and pride, a call for a return to US supremacy tied to a reluctance to use military force, a desire to let go but also to never forget.

"I really have mixed feelings about it," said Mr Sherman Eisner, 70, a former army platoon leader in Vietnam. "I did feel like it was an utter waste of time; there was a lot of death and destruction. But I also did think that we had to do this. Communism was encroaching in the region and if the government needed me to serve, I was going to do it."

No international conflict in US history has demanded more soul-searching in the country, nor has any so fundamentally altered the relationship between the government and its people.

And though the Vietnam War is hardly ever mentioned by name in Washington, it is clear its DNA remains in much of what the government does.

Yet, it also remains unclear if the US learnt the right lessons from the engagement.

Some of the most difficult questions about the war are still unanswered: Should the US continue to strive to be the pre-eminent military superpower? And can the world's problems be solved by exporting the American model?

The most visible reminders of the war are the ones that can be found when the country is confronted with the possibility of engaging in another ground battle.

Nearly all post-Vietnam presidents - from Gerald Ford to Barack Obama - have exhibited signs of the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" in their war policies. Each sought to avoid any long engagement and often stopped short of intervening when a quick exit did not look possible.

Only president George W. Bush - operating under the cloud of the Sept 11 attacks - was arguably immune.

The syndrome, coined shortly after the war ended, is described by Mr Marvin Kalb, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written extensively about the war, as "the belief, born of brutal experience during the Vietnam War, that never again will the United States gradually tiptoe into questionable wars without a clear-cut objective, overwhelming military force, an end-game strategy and, most important, the support of Congress and the American people".

It is a belief that remains alive and well today, he says. "In today's world of terrorist threat and guerilla war, the Vietnam Syndrome means, if nothing else, a fundamental reluctance to commit American military power anywhere in the world, unless it is absolutely necessary to protect the national interests of the country."

Indeed, President Obama's reliance on drone strikes, special forces as well as a determination to avoid having American "boots on the ground" are all classic hallmarks of the Vietnam Syndrome.

And even without explicitly naming the war, it is clear in his speeches that the conflict does figure in his decisions.

While outlining his foreign policy at West Point Military Academy last year, Mr Obama said: "Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures - without thinking through the consequences."

Further evidence of the war's lingering impact can be found in the halls of Congress where the use of military force has become a dividing, partisan issue.

The pre-Vietnam consensus that the government had unimpeachable physical superiority and moral virtue no longer exists.

Today, no one finds it odd that lawmakers are dragging their feet on a presidential request for authorisation to use force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Dr Christian Appy, a historian and author of American Reckoning, a book about the war's legacy, told The Straits Times: "The war shattered American exceptionalism but in the decades since, there has been a powerful effort to put it back together.

It hasn't been entirely successful, however, and the version of American exceptionalism we have today is far more defensive and fragile."

While the vestiges of the Vietnam War remain fairly easy to identify when it comes to war policy, the emotional scars are altogether harder to spot.

Americans today take extreme pride in their soldiers and servicemen returning from conflict zones.

They are greeted with fanfare and parades. It no longer matters if they support the war being fought or not.

Veterans returning from Iraq - a war many opposed - are feted just as highly as those returning from Afghanistan.

"Americans have learnt how to separate the soldier from the war," said Mr Weidman. "We've matured."

That maturing seems to have been part of the healing process as the country grappled with how badly it treated its soldiers returning from Vietnam.

Some were pelted with eggs or drenched in ketchup, others were called "baby killers" or spat at.

Mr Charles Knowlen, 79, who served two tours, said he probably escaped abuse because he changed into civilian clothes before coming home.

Indeed, service in Vietnam was long regarded as something to hide.

"From the time I returned from Vietnam in 1968, I didn't talk about being a Vietnam vet for decades.

I think there are tons of people who still probably won't admit to being a Vietnam vet."

The Vietnam War did not even give military veterans an advantage if they entered politics.

That has not changed despite the restoration of the reputation of ordinary vets.

In recent years, at least three former Vietnam veterans running for president have been defeated by candidates without military records.

Mr Al Gore and Mr John Kerry, both Vietnam vets, were defeated by Mr George W. Bush, who joined the Coast Guard to avoid being drafted.

Mr John McCain, a Vietnam prisoner of war, similarly found that military service did little good during his presidential campaign against Mr Obama.

All this stands in sharp contrast to the fact that between World War II and the 1990s, every US president had served in the military.

Despite the seemingly ubiquitous presence of the war's influence on the US of today, there are some glaring omissions.

For one thing, nearly everything that the US has learnt from the conflict seems to come from a perspective that it was the victim in this war.

Dr Appy said: "The way the war has been packaged here has made it easier for Americans not to think about all the destruction we did to Vietnam but instead to think of the war as an American tragedy, and to think about negative things it had done to us, how it divided us and undermined American pride and power."

He argued that without confronting its past properly, the US may end up missing some of the more important questions raised by the war 40 years ago. Dr Appy is concerned about how easily the US has slipped back into quagmires in the Middle East.

After all, as he and many of the veterans also point out, the lesson from Vietnam should not be strictly about how to treat veterans or when to go to war.

Mr Eisner said: "We've got to ask ourselves whether it's possible to make over a country in our own image... I think we forget that. We are just egocentric about what America is all about and we want everyone to follow our lead. It just doesn't work that way."

jeremyau@sph.com.sg

This article was first published on April 27, 2015.
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