I cannot help being struck by an amazing contrast—between a conflict that was a defining event in my life and a new reality. Things have changed. My son Craig, who is 25 and now a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, vacationed recently in Vietnam. He and his fiancée hiked through the Mekong Delta, into the Central Highlands, then up Route I over the Hai Van Pass to Hue, where they caught a bus to Hanoi. There, I spoke to Craig by telephone. The small hotel where he was staying plays the theme from the movie, “The Sting,” when it puts you on hold. They were headed for Haiphong the next day. On their journey they stopped and paid their respects at some familiar places— Quang Ngai, Chu Lai, Danang, An Hoa, The Arizona Valley, Hue, Khe Sanh, The Rockpile.
So things have changed. But let me take you back to a time many of you remember well—a time when a lot of men died.
Last year we noted a milestone of some importance: the 30th anniversary of the first U.S. ground units landing in what was then South Vietnam. It was an unopposed landing. Signs reading “Welcome to the gallant Marines” greeted the troops. Bud McFarlane, one of the principal figures in The Nightingale’s Song, commanded the artillery battery that went ashore on March 8, 1965.
That was 31 years ago. On April 30, 1975, 21 years ago, the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam climbed aboard a helicopter clutching a folded American flag and lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. With that, the nation of South Vietnam ceased to exist, and the curtain was drawn on this nation’s longest war.
Almost a year ago now, the United States established full diplomatic relations with its old enemy, Vietnam.
We lost the Vietnam War, with all that meant in terms of U.S. prestige abroad and in terms of this nation’s ability to carry out its international commitments, at least for a time—an extended time.
But the Vietnam War did something else. It fractured a generation of young Americans, creating a divide that may never be bridged. This generational fault line is what I’ve tried to examine in my book. On the surface, I’ve chronicled and woven together the lives of five men, three of whom—Oliver North, Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter—were caught up in the Iran-Contra Scandal. James Webb, one of the most decorated Marines of the Vietnam War, is a best-selling novelist and served as Secretary of the Navy. John McCain, a Navy pilot who survived more than five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war, is a U.S. Senator from Arizona. All five men are Naval Academy graduates, as I am. All were touched in varying ways by the Vietnam War and its aftermath. And all became well-known—for better or worse—during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
In The Nightingale’s Song, I recount their lives, which have intersected over the years in fascinating ways, in order to explore the generational fault line that first appeared in American society during the Vietnam War and which, I believe, continues to haunt the nation three decades later. That fault line cuts between those who served in the Armed Forces during the Vietnam War—and I am talking about liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between—and those who used money, wit, and connections to avoid serving.
The Nightingale’s Song is by no means a defense of the Vietnam War. Basically, I do not take a position on the war. Like you, I do not think any war is a good war. But let’s face it; some are better than others. World War II was a good war. The enemy was well-defined, and so was the threat. For me, though, the crucial issue during Vietnam was how one answered the summons, how one responded to the call to arms.
If you believed the war made sense, you had an obligation, I think, to serve. That means you did not play the deferment game, get married, have a baby, or, I must add, join the National Guard. Not in those days.
If you felt the war was a mistake, I think you had to keep faith with your generation by opposing the war in a manner by which you put yourself in peril, a kind of peril that in some way mirrored the danger that other members of your generation were experiencing in the jungles or in the rice paddies, in the air or on the sea in Southeast Asia. That meant standing up to the draft—walking into your draft board saying, “I am John Smith, I am 1-A, and I am not going to go.” That also meant you faced jail. Frankly, if a lot more young men had done that, I believe the machinery of the Selective Service System would have ground to a halt, the war would have ended, and lot of blood would never have been spilled. As it was, most men used a vast smorgasbord of deferments—often relying on a large network of draft counselors—to beat the system and avoid or evade the draft.
What is this generational fault line I am talking about? I define one part as those who served as enlisted men and junior officers during the Vietnam War. The other part is made up of their contemporaries, men of roughly the same age who did not serve. In simple terms, I am talking about those who went and those who didn’t.
What does that mean? The war was not the problem. Vietnam was hell, but so were all wars: World War I, World War II, Korea, no doubt the Peloponnesian War. The problem with Vietnam was the homecoming. Many had seen friends and comrades die. Many others came home maimed themselves. And yet, when they got back to the states, they were condemned by many as baby killers; some were spit upon. It was as if they had barely dragged themselves out of the primordial sludge. There was no recognition that what they had done was something that they and many others, including their government, viewed as an important mission.
Across this generational divide, meanwhile, they saw their unbloodied contemporaries flourishing. Not only was no stigma attached to what used to be called draft-dodging, the other half of this generation—as Jim Webb has said— wore their antiwar credentials like combat decorations. Or it had not affected their lives at all. They were unbloodied and prospering.
That was what turned Vietnam into what has been called an indigestible lump. It was as if a social contract had been broken, as if we had gone to bed one night and awakened to find the whole world changed. Bob Bedingfield, a chaplain who served with Ollie North’s regiment in Vietnam, probably put it best. “What that does,” he said, “is dislocate loyalty. It says I can never trust the system again. That is now the filter through which I interpret the world.”
A friend of Jim Webb, another Vietnam veteran, put it more strongly. He said, “There’s a wall 10 miles high and 50 miles thick between those of us who went and those who did not. And that wall is never going to come down.”
I think that is too strong. But I also believe that this generational fault line is more crucial than most people suspect. Look back at the history of this nation since the onset of the Great Depression. The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 ushered in a period in which most Americans looked on the government as an institution that could be trusted to have the best interests of the people at heart. F.D.R. led us through the Depression and World War II. Right up through the Kennedy years, this nation, despite its faults—most notably the racism that has stained it from the beginning—seemed driven by an unquenchable idealism and a willingness to sacrifice to help others.
The Vietnam War, reinforced by the Watergate scandal, changed all that. How many people trust their government today to do the right thing? The answer, I am afraid, is not many. And as I see it, this is why. You cannot march millions of men and thousands of women off to war, then when they come home tell them it was all a big mistake, without sooner or later paying a price—especially when the other half of their generation paid no price to speak of.
I had been to Vietnam, been wounded, had moved on, and become a newspaperman. I did not read books about Vietnam. I did not join veterans’ organizations. By choice, I never covered the military. Sometime during the dark couple of years after I was wounded, I realized I needed to move on, build a new life, and if not forget about Vietnam, put it off to the side. And so I did, quite successfully.
By the 1980s, I was the White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. Then, in 1986, the Iran- Contra Scandal blew all over Washington. And right at the heart of it were three Naval Academy men— Oliver North, Bud McFarlane, and John Poindexter. I did not know any of them well, but I thought of them as men imbued with the highest ideals of public service. And so I started asking myself a question: What the hell is going on here?
I covered the Iran-Contra affair for The Sun for the next year. I knew a Constitutional crisis when I saw one, and this was most assuredly a Constitutional crisis. But almost from the beginning I began to smell the Vietnam War in it. And that is what finally became compelling for me—to see what Iran-Contra said about my generation and, for that matter, the past three decades of American history. And that quest gave rise to another question: Was Iran-Contra, at least in part, the bill for Vietnam finally coming due? I concluded that it was. I also believe that if I am right, the country got off cheaply.
But I wanted to know more about this generation of well-meaning if ill-starred warriors, and Iran-Contra took me only so far. Jim Webb’s novels, and Jim Webb himself, took me further, showed me how a Vietnam veteran could take the anger and bitterness that afflicted his generation and give it a voice, make it real.
John McCain added the final piece to the puzzle. He had the worst war of any of the five principals in the book—five-and-a-half years in North Vietnamese prisons, 31 months in solitary, brutally tortured. He left prison crippled. And yet, almost immediately after descending from the plane at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, he began putting Vietnam behind him. He told himself that whatever destiny had in store for him, good or bad—and it had both—he was going to fulfill it, prison or no prison. And somehow he did. At least that is what he says, and if he is covering up, he sure puts on a good show.
Within months of his release, when people asked John McCain how he felt about the men and women who had demonstrated against the war, whose actions may well have extended the time he and his comrades spent in prison, he had an unvarying answer: “That doesn’t bother me,” he said. “The right of the American people to loudly disagree with the actions of their government is one of the things we were fighting for.”
And so a year ago, when President Bill Clinton extended diplomatic recognition to Vietnam, standing on the podium with him was John McCain, the senior Senator from Arizona.
We know, of course, that Senator McCain, a Republican and close adviser to Senator Bob Dole, would love to see President Clinton booted out of the White House this year. But when Senator McCain is asked how he feels about President Clinton’s actions as a young man, most notably his efforts to avoid the draft, his response may surprise you. He says, “Look, that’s not an issue. The American people elected Bill Clinton their president.” All of which tells me there are still a few people in Washington who truly believe in America.
A reviewer from The Boston Globe took great pains to say The Nightingale’s Song had vividly illuminated this generational divide to which I refer but had done little to close it, to bring about healing. He assumed that was my purpose. It was not. Everyone is always talking about reconciliation. Jim Webb, whom I describe as the kick-ass troubadour for a generation of combat veterans, spoke for many of us when he said, “I don’t want to be reconciled.”
In The Nightingale’s Song, I was talking to a number of different audiences. To my comrades, I was saying that I share their pride in having served. To others, those too young or too old to have served in Vietnam, I was saying that the fabled Vietnam generation was not made up solely of antiwar protesters. It was not just Janis Joplin and Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix and phony gurus like Timothy Leary and the Weathermen and Abby Hoffman and the rest of the Chicago Seven. It also included millions of men and thousands of women who actually set foot in Vietnam. To the other half of our generation, I was saying, I know you think you were smarter than us, and more sensitive, and lived on a higher moral plane, and you probably thought you had more reason to live.
But that is not what you looked like to us.