Why Are We in Vietnam?

1) The Fog of War

Do you recall the haunting incantatory refrain of that Charlie Daniels song: "Still in Saigon … Still in Saigon … Still in Saigon … "? Kerry's advisors are telling him (now) to avoid the subject. But I think John Kerry needs to talk to us about Vietnam. Not the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth thing, but what he really thinks about the war. I think we all need to talk about Vietnam. Those like me who opposed the war, those who favored it, those who fought it, have had nearly three decades since the last copter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to think and rethink our positions.

And yet because of silence, shame and, now, Presidential politics, it hasn't been discussed candidly, not by either candidate. And as a result, in some profound, not closely examined way, we're all "still in Saigon."

The Kerry candidacy at least has us thinking about it, but the exigencies of the campaign don't encourage frank and open talk about it, much less the dreaded "nuance." Kerry's Boston convention-in a stunning decision whose magnitude is only beginning to sink in-chose to sacralize Vietnam as a heroic struggle, a just war on the order of the Second World War, the two conflicts explicitly conflated in the convention rhetoric, with the Shakespearean/Spielbergian phrase "band of brothers" sealing it. Just being part of a "band of brothers" is something to be applauded, no matter what that band of brothers is engaged in doing.

By declaring "I defended this country as a young man," Mr. Kerry explicitly accepts the Lyndon Johnson– Richard Nixon rationale for continuing the Vietnam War: that the slaughter there was somehow defending America.

It was schizophrenic (Iraq war, bad! Vietnam, good!), incoherent, and inconsistent with the candidate's own, never-disavowed anti-war testimony in 1971. Even Robert McNamara, architect of the Vietnam War, now thinks and will say openly that Vietnam was a terrible mistake (and explains why in detail in Errol Morris' The Fog of War ), but suddenly the Democratic Party-which since 1972 had fought the war and never retracted its opposition-now sought to make it, retroactively, a noble cause.

I've done some rethinking about the war and what I do and don't still oppose about it. I'm sure John Kerry has, too-but he has yet to disclose the evolution of his thinking on the defining conflict of his life, the evolution that has brought him from self-confessed participant in "atrocities" to proud "band of brothers" self-celebration.

Some think it's unfortunate that the entire campaign for the past month has been about Vietnam. I think it's only unfortunate that the argument comes so late, has been mainly about Kerry's medals and not about the merits of the war. Still, the medal controversy at least served to open up the whole question, and it might not be too late to have an honest debate about the lessons of Vietnam. It wasn't going to materialize out of the blue, out of nothing, this debate.

If it required the confluence of the Kerry candidacy and the Swift-boat critics to bring Vietnam to the fore, so what? It was a war that killed nearly 60,000 Americans and, if you believe Robert McNamara, up to 3.4 million Vietnamese (I've seen the figure three million cited elsewhere). Either one is a shocking figure-even more shocking if it doesn't include, as I don't think McNamara intended it to, the nearly equal number of millions killed in the aftermath: the number that the Hanoi victors killed in their gulags, the approximately two million plus murdered by the Cambodian genocide, and the hundreds of thousands of boat people who died fleeing the new Vietnamese police state in the South.

Five or six million dead, and we still don't have a consensus on what went wrong and why. We all piously agree that the Vietnam vets "served honorably," but was the war wise, was it waged honorably? Better now than never. Better now than continuing to sweep Vietnam under the rug, shrouding it with sentimentality without a re-examination of what lessons should and shouldn't be learned from its blighted history-and only bringing it out selectively to credit or discredit some policy, some candidate or other.

At first I resisted the relevance of refighting Vietnam, but watching the Boston convention's retrospective sentimentalization of Vietnam, watching The Fog of War again and rethinking Robert McNamara's somewhat disingenuous Vietnam mea culpa, and reading John Kerry's 1971 we-committed-atrocities-and-war-crimes-in-Vietnam testimony, left me feeling that in some important way, I don't know who John Kerry is: He is still a mystery to me, to all of us, if we can't figure out what he really, in his heart of hearts, thinks about all this now.

Does he in fact think that Vietnam was as noble a cause as the fight against Hitler-as the appropriation of the "band of brothers" from its Spielbergian World War II hagiography implies? Does Mr. Kerry now think Vietnam was a "just war"? Does he then repudiate his own repudiation of it in 1971? Should he? Or is his position more complex, more nuanced, now? Does he take Mr. McNamara's position that the ends (stopping communist police-state expansion) were just, but the means were not?

I think there's a case to be made that John Kerry was right about Vietnam for both the right and wrong reasons. At least back in 1971, he thought that communism was merely a "mystical" threat. Tell that to the tens of millions of victims of Marxist police states. It wasn't mystical to them. But many, like myself, came late to this realization (many don't give evidence of registering its implications at all), and maybe Mr. Kerry has as well. But if he was wrong about communism being merely a "mystical" threat, he was right about the futility of the war, don't you think? The big question about Mr. Kerry is whether he's modified his vision of the war and what was wrong with it-or, indeed, what (if anything) he has realized.

If the Swift-boat vets who oppose Mr. Kerry felt betrayed by his anti-war stance, shouldn't those who opposed the war feel betrayed by his convention's glorification of it? But most are so blinded by Bush hatred that they don't see how the retrospective celebration of killing Vietnamese may come to haunt us-and brand them as hypocrites.

So was it a just war or not? Quick answer from my changed and conflicted perspective: It was a just cause (in the sense that those who said that Hanoi was trying to impose a Soviet-style police state, complete with gulags for dissidents, on all of Vietnam turned out to be right). Yes, it was a nationalist, anti-colonial civil war, too, which is what made it complicated and impossible to win-but the result was a state that crushed dissent as murderously as Pinochet's Chile, if not more.

But, on the other hand, the abstract justness of the cause did not mean it was a justly (or wisely) waged war. McNamara tells us in The Fog of War that two to three times as many bombs were dropped on Vietnam than on all of Western Europe during World War II. It was waged with murderously criminal stupidity by the "best and brightest" (David Halberstam's sardonic phrase for Robert McNamara's Band of Bundys), in ways that profoundly undermined the larger just cause of resistance to the spread of police-state totalitarianism. Shouldn't John Kerry, justly celebrated for his wartime courage, have the political courage to say something critical about Vietnam-if not as critical as Mr. Kerry was in 1971, perhaps as critical as McNamara was in 2003, at least-rather than merely exploit it for self-promotion?

2) A Paris Option?

But before getting deeper into comparisons between John Kerry and Robert McNamara, before examining John Kerry's choices over Vietnam-please let me utter one word I have yet to see uttered in the debate over Kerry and Vietnam, heroism and betrayal.

That word is Paris, and it goes to the myth and the puzzle of John Kerry's original decision to volunteer for Vietnam. "I volunteered for service because it was the right thing to do," Mr. Kerry has proclaimed. Puzzling because he'd given an anti-war speech at Yale at his 1966 graduation: Was it "the right thing to do" because he believed killing people in a misguided and unjust war was the right thing to do (as opposed to those who followed the courage of their convictions-to resistance in one form or another)?

But it seems there may have been "nuances." If you believe what Mr. Kerry was reported to have said in a 1970 interview with the Harvard Crimson , "volunteer[ing] for service wasn't his first impulse." Back in March 2004, the London Telegraph tracked down the issue of the Crimson with the Kerry interview and its author, one Samuel Goldhaber, identified by the Telegraph as a cardiologist currently associated with the Harvard School of Medicine.

Back then, Mr. Goldhaber reported (and stands by his account of what Mr. Kerry told him now) that "When [Kerry] approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy."

According to the Telegraph , the Kerry campaign declined to return "repeated phone calls" on this question and has not since denied the story. (As of press time, Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan had not returned phone calls from The Observer .)

If there's truth to this story, the Paris option puts a different spin on "reporting for duty" and "send John Kerry," doesn't it? It's more like: "They won't let me sit out the war in Left Bank cafés, so I'm reporting for duty because I'd rather not get drafted." Before he volunteered for Vietnam, did he volunteer for the Sorbonne?

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It could have been a principled decision, by someone who opposed the war, to find a way to avoid killing innocents in what he believed was an unjust cause. The French babes would be just a little icing on the cake. (But why not stay here in America and become a leader of the anti-war movement?)

To understand the question of Mr. Kerry's decision, it helps to understand the parameters of the draft situation and the culture of draft strategizing at Yale when John Kerry was there. Maybe I can throw a little light on that; I was there two years behind Kerry. In fact I recall, when working my freshman scholarship job in the library's Reserve Book Room, checking out reading assignments for Mr. Kerry. My fellow workers had filled me in on what a Big Man on Campus he was-head of the Political Union, styling himself "J.F.K." after John F. Kennedy, Presidential ambitions, Skull and Bones. (I actually marched in a John Kerry–led demonstration-in support of tenure for a metaphysically inclined philosopher.)

The draft law was changing in the years between Mr. Kerry's graduation and mine. When Mr. Kerry was there, local draft boards still had the option (but not the requirement) to extend undergraduate deferments from the draft (which often meant becoming a grunt on the front lines in Vietnam) to those who pursued graduate study. By the time I graduated, deferments for further study were being abolished, although deferments for teaching were still good. (My story, if it matters: I'd been offered a teaching fellowship at Yale Graduate School which my draft board accepted for one year before throwing me into the draft lottery pool. I got a low lottery number, but the metal surgical staples in my shoulder joints-holding them together after accidents-resulted in a IY classification, which meant that I could be called up, but in the end wasn't.)

I've always been in awe of John Kerry's courage in combat, and I still am-but I have to say that it came as a kind of revelation that his first impulse may not have been to "report for duty," but to report to Paris.

Another thing about draft culture at Yale at the time was that the clued-in people, many of the well-connected preppies, knew that if your draft board wasn't going to give you a deferment, the savvy thing was to try to get an officer's commission in the Reserves or the Guard. That's what George Bush did.

John Kerry chose a path that led him into harm's way, but volunteering for the Naval Reserve didn't necessarily say, "I want to go to Vietnam and see combat." It often said, "I don't want to be a Vietnam grunt like the draftees; I'd prefer the aristocracy of officership and the possibility of a smooth worldwide cruise."

So it's not clear to me which it was for John Kerry. None of the three recent Kerry biographies mention the Paris option (although the 2003 Boston Globe series does have Mr. Kerry saying he thought he'd be drafted if he didn't enlist, and the Paul Alexander biography mentions the likelihood of a draft).

But if Paris was his first choice, Mr. Kerry hasn't shared it even with Douglas Brinkley, whose Tour of Duty makes it sound as if there wasn't even a desire to avoid the draft/grunt fate. Volunteering was his first and only choice: "As a duty-bound Kennedyite, Kerry was now ready to serve his country." Mr. Brinkley quotes Mr. Kerry saying, "President Kennedy had called on our generation to 'pay any price' for global freedom, so duty dictated we enlist." If he first sought a deferment, as he apparently told the Crimson , he evidently decided not to be fully candid with his later biographers. Even his statement to the Globe in 2003 suggests there was an element of avoiding the draft and avoiding the grunts' grim fate. The omission of that aspect of "reporting for duty" skews the narrative, muddies the waters of what was going on in Mr. Kerry's mind from the very beginning. Adding to the confusion: "reporting for duty," many medals, killing Vietnamese, then coming back to the U.S. to admit to committing atrocities along with his fellow vets. And now celebrating the experience as a spiritual journey with a "band of brothers." Maybe it will make more sense if we knew what Mr. Kerry's attitude was at the beginning of this narrative.

3) Calling Captain Nuance

The beginning of the narrative is important, because part of the argument about Vietnam involves the kinds of choices made by people who opposed the war. If you believed that going to Vietnam meant you could end up killing innocent people in an unjust cause, should one report so readily for duty? Or should one resist? And should one make home movies about one's Vietnam service for use in future political campaigns if one does go? Or is it better to find a way to avoid killing innocent people, even if it means someone else may have to risk his life in your place? It's not a simple question, but John Kerry, of all people, should certainly have put some thought into it.

There's something Mickey Kaus wrote in 2001 that helps focus the question; it was quoted recently in an essay by Mackubin Thomas Owens, a Marine Vietnam vet, in The Weekly Standard . Mr. Kaus was writing about "the furor over whether the killing of certain civilians by men under the command of former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey amounted to a war crime …. [This]," Mr. Kaus wrote, "reminds us that avoiding serving in Vietnam had an honorable and realistic ethical basis (in addition to its realistic selfish basis)."

Exactly: War crimes happen in just and unjust wars-should one's participation be affected by one's evaluation of which it is? Avoiding killing innocents is noble, but is it as noble if it's done in part to avoid being killed oneself? Does it depend on the ratio of selfish to unselfish motives? There are nuances here. Please, Captain Nuance-you, John Kerry-report for duty: Tell us what your thinking was, not just so we can understand you, but so we can better understand our past and ourselves.

And I'd like to know what Mr. Kerry really thinks about the war protesters. In his 1971 testimony, he praised the "misfits" (as he affectionately and ironically called the anti-war activists), saying they were the ones who were doing more to save the troops, save innocent lives on both sides of a mistaken war, than the generals and strategists running the war. Does he still believe that?

And speaking of those misguidedly running the war, I've had a good-natured running argument with my friend Errol Morris about Robert McNamara. Readers may recall how much I admired Errol's McNamara documentary, The Fog of War ("New Morris Film Traps McNamara in a Fog of War," Sept. 29, 2003), how important I thought it was when it came out-and now, how much more important it's become since Vietnam has become a campaign issue and part of the argument about Iraq.

My objection to Mr. McNamara's mea culpa in the film has to do with his silence after he left his Defense Secretary post in 1967, and until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, despite knowing certainly by 1967 that the war could not be won-that it had become a useless killing machine. My problem with Mr. McNamara was not his rationale for the war originally- resisting the takeover of the South by a Soviet puppet police-state regime-which, in fact, came true. My problem with Mr. McNamara was that when he realized it was a futile, no-win situation-that in fact it was undermining the legitimacy of the struggle against Sovietism- he refused to speak up .

He took a sinecure job from L.B.J. as head of the World Bank when L.B.J. moved him out of the Defense Department. But once he left, he didn't have to accept another government post. He didn't have to silence himself. If he knew hundreds of thousands were dying in Vietnam every year from 1967 to 1975 for no good reason, he had a responsibility to speak out. Daniel Ellsberg, another war architect, notably did when it made a difference.

Mr. McNamara finally did, but not till a memoir he wrote in the mid-90's, which earned him a harsh (and I think deserved) reproof for delayed truth-telling from a New York Times editorial, reportedly written by Howell Raines, that condemned Mr. McNamara for his silence after 1967, "when he too realized … that the dissidents were right" and that the war was "wasting lives atrociously."

Unlike Mr. McNamara, Mr. Kerry spoke out in 1971. It's a shame that he based a lot of his atrocity testimony on the questionable reports he heard in the "Winter Soldier" show-but does the fact that there were false and exaggerated reports of atrocities mean that there were no atrocities at all?

There was a fascinating moment on TV recently when Sean Hannity was questioning one of the anti-Kerry Swift-boat vets, and the two of them were in sympathy about the Swift-boat vets' ads attacking Mr. Kerry's 1971 testimony. But then Mr. Hannity asked a question and got an answer I don't think he expected. He said to the vet dismissively, apropos Mr. Kerry's atrocity testimony, " … Did you know anybody in Vietnam … that committed any atrocities?"

"Well, you put me on the spot with that one," the vet said.

"Does that mean yes?" Mr. Hannity asked.

"Yes," said the vet unequivocally.

Mr. Kerry's atrocity testimony is flawed, yes, but the war he was speaking out against was more flawed. I can see how wounded some vets and P.O.W.'s must have felt-and still feel-about that testimony. But I think Mr. Kerry made a calculation that it was more important, that he would save more lives from being wasted, by speaking out against the futility of this war. I think his testimony goes wrong when he dismisses the "mystical" threat of communism-but that's easier to say now. He was wrong about that, but doesn't he still think he was right about the thrust of his testimony?

The thing is, it took Robert McNamara too long-way too long-to break his silence on Vietnam. And even then, his "confession" is a bit disingenuous and self-serving, if you ask me. But at least he's sticking with his story. John Kerry spoke out right away, but now he suddenly gives us an "Oh, What a Lovely War" convention about the glory days of his "band of brothers" in Vietnam, and it seems like he's taken his critique back.

What is his critique? How does he apply it to Iraq? These are things I want to hear. I have a feeling that if he took the time to spell out the evolution of his thought process on Vietnam to the American people-and the effect it had on his ambivalent thought process on Iraq, conflicts, nuances and all-he could get elected. And that if he maintains this sham Potemkin-village "band of brothers" act, neither he, nor we, will ever escape from Saigon.