I am getting over a virus (ii)

from the Janitor at the Viet Nam Literature Project

Still on light duty dusting old work. Let’s see what I started to say as I rested 15 years ago.

I know something about narratives by Americans about the Viet Nam war. In 1976 I read every one in the Exeter library, which would be an outstanding liberal arts college collection, for a junior history essay at that school.

I drew the conclusion that all these people wrote from ignorance about history and fantasy about the Vietnamese, from participation in events set in motion by people who shared their ignorance and fantasy. Over time I've added some subtleties.

The war managers were in fact informed by history, although it was that of Europe in 1939. Those outside government who struggled against the war often bought the determinist history of the Vietnamese Communists.

There were individuals, even the whole group that wrote the Pentagon Papers, who were well-informed realists, who understood what was happening, and many of them had substantial relationships with Vietnamese. Our intelligence - Army, Navy, CIA, Rand - was wonderfully good.

But these are footnotes to the obvious. On the print evidence, most Americans have remembered the war much as I experienced it as a child in my Connecticut suburb, as in a dream, when the part of your brain that reasons and acts is deliberately shut down, so you won't do yourself a mischief while you sleep.

There was no war aim for the US in Viet Nam - even the best rationale for the Cold War, George Kennan's, the one that proved correct, counseled sitting tight to let communism rot and fall. The only way to defend Saigon, by infantry without the artillery or air support that fed the revolution in the countryside, was never brought to the American people and likely would have failed to win their support or that of the Vietnamese.

Good call, at 16 for the bicentennial in 1976. Kept me out of the profession of the English-language history of the United States of America, where men in sports jackets take seriously the chowder in the heads, the stuffing in the shirts, of dead suits.

Gave me purchase on the deliberate fantasists, the novelists and poets read in our press and school rooms as witnesses to the United States in both Viet Nams. It was my way to the egress, the writing on the wall that dumped me from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum of hoaxes for suckers and out into life.

My other big project that third year of high school was the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Formed me just as much, come to think of it, as did my reading of men and their notions: the women of temperance, the very first anti-colonialists, reasoning together for abolition and suffrage.

Portrait at All People Soul Food Grill, Hillsborough, North Carolina, © Tim Duffy. Link to the essay “I am getting over a virus” here. The first Viet Nam letter on “I am getting over a virus” appeared on February 7. The third and fourth and fifth appeared on February 13, February 16 and February 19, 2024.