A Bloody Rite of Passage

By LANCE MORROW

Viet Nam had a genius for surprise, an exquisite gift for defeating ! expectations. Rudyard Kipling once issued a sort of regional warning about that: "And the end of the fight is a tombstone white/ with the name of the late deceased,/ And the epitaph drear: 'A Fool lies here who/ tried to hustle the East.' "

The enemy had been invisible in an earlier part of the war, hiding in jungles, in tunnels, ghosting around in the pre-dawn: killer shadows. They dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese. They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were--the unseen man who shot from the tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the wash, the child concealing a grenade.

But by 1975 the Americans were mostly gone. They left after the Potemkin peace set up by the Paris accords of two years earlier, for which Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The conflict had been "Vietnamized." And with the Americans out, the war of the lethal vanishings, the surreptitious strikes, was past.

And so ten years ago this month, the North Vietnamese swept down the map like the blade of a guillotine. They came in full divisions, with artillery and tanks. They banged across the countryside like Patton. It was no longer the endless, hallucinatory Viet Nam at all, but blitzkrieg, Western war, all of those years of inconclusive struggle finished off briskly in a short, surreal spring.

The Northerners' progress was weirdly effortless. They rolled across the Central Highlands. There the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) collapsed in headlong panic. The ARVN soldiers fought bravely elsewhere, notably around Xuan Loc, but the Communists drove steadily south. They overwhelmed all the place-names that had become so improbably familiar: Quang Tri, Hue, Danang, Kontum, Pleiku, Nha Trang.

Before them the Northerners drove long, miserable columns of refugees, civilians, ARVN soldiers, the old and young, all terrified, struggling numbly south toward Saigon. The Communists shelled and machine-gunned some columns. The refugees stumbled on across the corpses and the dying. From the Danang airfield, the last plane took off with men clinging to the landing gear and stairs. Some who went aloft crouched in the wheel housings were crushed as the landing gear cranked up. Along the coast, ARVN soldiers deserted their families and in some cases shot civilians for a place on a boat.

South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu appealed for the American help to which he was entitled by the Paris treaty--and to which South Viet Nam had grown addicted. But the U.S. Congress, long since weary of Viet Nam, refused it. On April 21, Thieu resigned and a few days later flew to Taipei, reportedly shipping out a retirement fund of 3 1/2 tons of gold.

One day toward the end, the Americans tried to evacuate some 240 orphans, and their plane crashed in a paddyfield outside Saigon; only 100 or so survived. That seemed to be the fate of even the best American intentions in Viet Nam. As an early French colonialist reported home from Viet Nam in the 19th century: "Everything here tends toward ruin."

The Communists closed in on Saigon. At last, on the 29th of April, they rocketed Tan Son Nhut, the huge airfield through which millions of American soldiers had passed over the years, coming into the war zone or going back to "the world." The last two Americans to die before Saigon's fall were killed in the attack: Marine Lance Corporal Darwin Judge and Marine Corporal Charles McMahon.

In anger and despair, some South Vietnamese turned upon the Americans who were now clearly going to abandon them. ARVN soldiers menaced Westerners in the streets. Terrified crowds of Vietnamese surrounded the U.S. embassy on Thong Nhut Street, begging their old protectors to get them out. Some tried to hand their babies over the wall into the embassy compound. Marines used tear gas and rifle butts to hold off what had become a mob of America's allies. Relays of helicopters began ferrying people out of the compound, evacuating the Americans and many of the Vietnamese who had worked for them.

U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin had behaved for weeks as if South Viet Nam was not going to fall at all, whistling with glum urbanity through the Asian Gotterdammerung. He did not want to start a panic. Now, at 3:30 on the morning of Wednesday, April 30, 1975, President Ford flashed orders from the White House for Martin to board a helicopter on the embassy roof and get to the U.S. fleet in the South China Sea.

Many civilians were lifted from the roof of the Pittman apartments. Of the vast American military commitment to Viet Nam, only eleven Marines remained on the embassy roof. Crowds of Vietnamese by this time were looting the embassy. A man's arm smashed through the window of the door leading to the rooftop helipad. A Marine jerked the arm down smartly onto the broken glass, and as the Marines waited for their deliverance, they alternated between studying the sky to the southeast and raking arms across the glass to keep the Vietnamese at bay. A Chinook-46 escorted by six Cobra gunships came fluttering in from the sea. The Marines dropped canisters of tear gas onto the crowd below, and then they boarded their Chinook. But they had also gassed themselves. As Journalist David Butler writes in his new book The Fall of Saigon, "They forgot that a settling helicopter sucks up air. So the last official Americans out of Viet Nam, the eleven Marines and the crew of the CH-46, including the pilot--all flew blind out of Saigon."

Out in the South China Sea, so many South Vietnamese helicopters were trying to get down onto the American flight decks that Navy crews simply pushed the landed choppers, one after another, into the sea in order to make way for the next--millions of dollars of American helicopters dumped over the side like garbage from the fantail. The spectacle became one of the last enduring images from history's most visual war.

Thus did the Americans leave Viet Nam, after 16 years, 58,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and $150 billion expended.

The other anniversaries of this season, such as next month's 40th anniversary of V-E day, will have about them a certain triumphal air for Americans. They will celebrate not merely the fact that the U.S. won but that they fought on the side that incontestably should have won. The outcome of World War II seemed to validate American power as an instrument of virtue in the world.

The tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon is a vastly more complex occasion. The U.S. lost the war, although technically, of course, the country was out of it by the time of the final collapse. But the loss itself was not as traumatic (for Americans, anyway) as the way that the war was fought, the way it was perceived, and peculiarly hated. The struggle was waged, savagely, in Southeast Asia. But it was also fought in America, in American institutions, in the American streets and, above all, in the American conscience.

The war destroyed many lives, American and Vietnamese. But it did other damage: to American faith in government and authority, for one thing. Oddly, however, the trauma had its creative side. The events that shattered the American faith in authority also had a sometimes chaotically liberating effect, breaking old molds and freeing the imagination to create new forms, new movements (environmentalism, say, or feminism), new companies, high-tech ideas that might have been stifled by traditional lines of authority. No doubt the enormous baby-boom generation would have effected changes anyway. But the war brought with it gusts of wild energy. "Freedom," said the lyric, "is just another word for nothing left to lose." The war, and the protest against it, shook loose forces in American life and gave them a style and prestige they might not otherwise have had. Suddenly, politics came dancing with a loony phosphorescence. There was a certain giddy proximity of death in the time--rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix went tumbling down from drug overdoses, as if to dramatize the war's theme of meaninglessly, profligately blasted youth.

Perhaps it was all a gaudy American self-indulgence, the war and the music getting together to create a prototype of the rock video. In both the countercultural side-show and the councils of power that made war policy, there was a note of manic narcissism, of self-importance, almost of autoeroticism. There was dangerous fun in the air, the sheer buzz of so much power, a life-and-death excitement. But someone should have known better.

Sometimes, in the American context, it is difficult to know whether to judge the Viet Nam era in historical terms or in psychiatric terms. One can look at it coolly, from the outside, as geopolitics, weighing the gains and losses and ironies of the war. But then there comes, even to the civilian (we are all, beyond a certain age, veterans of Viet Nam), a vivid flashback, and the mind fills with the war again. It comes back and back and back. Charles de Gaulle called Viet Nam "rotten country," and he was right in a psychic as well as a physical sense. Rotten, certainly, for Americans. Viet Nam took America's energy and comparative innocence--a dangerous innocence, perhaps--and bent it around so that the muzzle fired back in the nation's face. The war became America vs. America.

Viet Nam left the nation with a massive and interlocking sense of bad conscience. Says Pollster Daniel Yankelovich: "Those who didn't serve have a bad conscience. Those who did and those who supported the war and then changed their minds have a bad conscience. And the way we treated the soldiers who served there gives us all a bad conscience." Those who fought in the war carried a burden of guilt unrelieved by the customary rites of absolution, by the parades, the welcome home, the collective embrace that gathers a soldier back into the fold of the community after he has been sent out to commit the inevitable horrors of a war that his elders told him was necessary.

It was a particular idiocy of Pentagon practice that men went to Viet Nam alone, stayed for a year and then came back alone. The policy ensured that 1) there was rarely any soldier in a combat zone who had more than a few months' experience at it, and 2) the men thus rotated in and out tended to feel isolated, not part of the unit.

Those who stayed home, or even fought in the streets to keep from going, now feel guilty about those who fought and never came home. Most of those who sent the soldiers to Viet Nam are still pained by what they did, and they usually cannot--or will not try to--explain it. Veterans speak most bitterly about those who sent them half a world away to die and then retreated into silence when the war went bad.

The war in Viet Nam reverberated through the nation's life as profoundly as the Civil War and the Depression did. It was the formative, defining event for the largest generation of Americans ever, and it divided that generation in ways that will be felt for years. The war deflected and thwarted what might otherwise have been the productive idealism of the enormous baby-boom generation.

The sheer passage of time has helped to heal some wounds. But it has left a certain fatalism. In Viet Nam, the G.I.'s absurdist, shrugging slogan was "It don't mean nuthin'." Today Jim Garnett, a Seattle carpenter who served as an Army supply clerk, says, "It was just something we all went through. Like when you were a kid and your old man comes home drunk at night. He wakes everybody up, everybody knows what's going on, and it makes everyone real uncomfortable. But in the morning, no one talked about it."

Viet Nam toppled a lot of dominoes in American life. It forced Lyndon Johnson out of the White House, paving the way for Richard Nixon. In a besieged mentality brought on by antiwar protests, some of Nixon's men contrived the various schemes that added up to Watergate, thereby enabling the eventual election of Jimmy Carter ("I will never lie to you").

In a sense, the war in Viet Nam has dictated American political life for a generation. But for the war, Johnson might have served two terms. He might have made his Great Society work, or at least work better than it ultimately did, with program after program collapsing under the burden of unfocused - goals, unbridled spending and unbelievable bureaucratic bloat. He might have been succeeded by, say, Robert Kennedy. All of that is, of course, imponderable. As it was, the war shook the Democratic Party for years. Among a number of other divisions, in fact, the party is still split along the lines drawn years ago between hawk and dove, Johnson and Kennedy. Says George McGovern, who ran on an antiwar platform in the 1972 presidential election and was buried in the landslide that gave Richard Nixon a second term: "The Viet Nam tragedy is at the root of the confusion and division of the Democratic Party. It tore up our souls."

Because L.B.J. tried to have both guns and butter, the war brought on an inflation that, along with the oil crisis, destabilized the world's economy all through the 1970s. Then Carter gave way to Reagan, who has abetted if not entirely caused a resurgence of American self-confidence, an unexpected post- Viet Nam syndrome. The new mood of the nation is out of harmony with most of the countercultural forces that gave the U.S. a certain nihilistic energy in the '60s. The war and the counterculture could at certain moments seem part of the same rock 'n' roll, drawing their energy from one dark circuit. Grunts in Viet Nam sometimes carried their tape players into firefights. They would listen to the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.

The war has always been refracted rather strangely in the American mind. If time has moved on, it has also receded, in a psychological sense. Seven years ago, the war seemed much further away than it does now. During a long period in the '70s, the nation indulged in a remarkable exercise of recoil and denial and amnesia about Viet Nam. Americans did not want to hear about it, to think about it.

That denial was part of the special ordeal of the Viet Nam veterans, an ordeal that began when they arrived back in the U.S. and found that even their families were not interested in talking about what they had just been through, or were embarrassed about it. "I went over there thinking I was doing something right and came back a bum," says Larry Langowski, now an administrator for Illinois Bell. "I came back decked with medals on my uniform, and I got spit on by a hippie girl."

The veterans were mostly very young (average age in the war zone: 19, as opposed to 26 during World War II). The nation that sent them to battle now wanted to deny, to nullify their experience, their sacrifice. It made the veterans very angry. They learned to leave that period off their resumes.

Perhaps the most important change in American attitudes toward the war in the past few years has been the public acceptance of those who fought. The Viet Nam veteran, after a long struggle, has acquired a considerable respect--if not entirely the Government benefits (educational and medical) that he deserves. One sees the change in television shows, for example, or in movies. During the '70s, the Viet Nam veteran was often portrayed as a murderous psychotic (as in the 1978 movie Taxi Driver) or as a drug-wasted, haunted loser. In Coming Home, he became more sympathetic, though in one character he was a cripple, and in another, bitter and troubled and suicidal. The Deer Hunter ended with an elegiac singing of God Bless America in a blue-collar bar in Pennsylvania. In today's story lines, the Viet Nam vet tends to be a self-reliant hero, muscular and handsome--men like Tom Selleck in TV's Magnum, P.I., or the cartooned heroes of The A-Team.

Some movies reverse the moral onus that Americans long felt about the war. They are fantasies of revenge, like Missing in Action, in which Chuck Norris returns to Indochina to rescue old buddies still held there by evil Vietnamese who look like the wily, despicable Japanese in World War II films. These changes reflect a very literal and significant transaction. They suggest that in the American imagination, the Viet Nam veteran, erstwhile psychotic, cripple and loser, has been given back his manhood.

Viet Nam veterans, maturing into their 30s and 40s, have begun to achieve some power in American society. They are seen more as leaders, less as victims. Charles Robb, who commanded a Marine rifle company in 1968-69, is the Governor of Virginia. Bob Kerrey, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner who lost part of a leg in action as a member of the Seals, a Navy special forces unit, is the Governor of Nebraska. John Kerry, a Navy officer and eloquent spokesman against the war during congressional hearings in 1971, is a Senator from Massachusetts. Veteran and Writer John Wheeler, who was a chief organizer for the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, is secretary of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the residually romantic view of war (up until recently, the American view), it was an essentially knightly exercise--a man riding out in resplendent armor (B-52s, perhaps, Hueys, the light observation helicopters known as Loaches, all of that brilliant technology) to rescue the innocent ! from the wicked. In the original versions of the knightly ideal, the wicked were the enemies of Christ, a role for which Communists qualify.

But when the knights somehow seem monstrous, killers risen out of a black id, perpetrators of My Lai, then the entire chivalric logic collapses, and masculinity itself becomes a horror--all rage and aggression and reptilian brain. Viet Nam changed American notions about the virtues of masculinity and femininity. In the '60s, during the great violence of the war, masculine power came to be subtly discredited in many circles as oafish and destructive. The heritage of the Enlightenment (the scientific method, progress, that dreamy Jeffersonian clarity of mind that told us all problems could be solved) now seemed drawn into a darker business. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that the essential American soul was "hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer."

So even the masculine hormones became suspect. Femininity was the garden of life, masculinity the landscape of death. Perhaps in a subliminal way, the long hair and beads that protesting men wore in the '60s were intended to detoxify them, to take the curse off their masculinity.

The Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in Washington two years ago, became a central symbol in the veterans' struggle for acceptance. It was not built by the Government, but by contributions, largely from the veterans themselves. The memorial's design--two long triangular panels of polished black granite, set below ground level, inscribed with the names of all the 58,022 who died in the Viet Nam War--struck many veterans as insulting at the time it was chosen. "A black gash of shame," Tom Carhart, a Viet Nam veteran and West Pointer, called it. Novelist James Webb (Fields of Fire), now an Assistant Secretary of Defense, wanted a white memorial, set above ground, with a flag. "A memorial should express more than grief," he says. "It should honor the service of those who died."

And yet the memorial has a force that even some of its critics have begun to acknowledge. It is a transcendent re-creation of the experience of the war itself. To walk down the declivity toward the apex of the walls, the walkway declining at what seems to be precisely the angle of escalation of the war, and to go deeper and deeper into the names of the dead, is to go back into the Viet Nam War. The force of so many names, the names a long incantation, listed in the order of their deaths, and the specificity of the names, each one individual, and the names seen in the black granite that also reflects the sky and the countenance of the one looking, all produce an effect that is as deeply moving as any memorial, anywhere.

For many veterans, however, acceptance has not been enough. About 5% of those who served in Viet Nam, according to the estimate, still suffer from post- traumatic-stress syndrome, a chronic form of what once was known as battle fatigue. The peculiarities of combat in Viet Nam made them especially vulnerable--never knowing who the enemy was, living in almost constant fear of attack in the bush.

Today the war has resurfaced in the American consciousness in new ways. College courses on the conflict were practically nonexistent a few years ago. Now there are hundreds of them. Some of the students taking them were not even born at the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, and most of them could not explain what that resolution was. To many college students, the Viet Nam War might as well be the Peloponnesian wars: both are ancient history. Many students cannot say whether the U.S. was allied with the South Vietnamese or the North Vietnamese.

Yet some students display a sort of spooky fascination with war and arms. Says Andrea McElderry, a history professor at the University of Louisville: "War is just 'in' now." At the University of Wisconsin, a student named Stephen Mackey says, a little extravagantly, "Fascination with the Viet Nam War has just gripped my generation. The males in my generation are just obsessed. Theoretically and strategically, the war was really good. We're getting away from the Viet Nam phobia." Mackey will join the Marines this spring.

In somewhat muted form, there is as much ambivalence about Viet Nam among today's students as there was in the nation at large during the '60s. At the University of Colorado, Historian Robert Schulzinger observes, "As the war itself was divisive, its memory is divisive. You still have highly nationalist students who would try to do it again, only this time getting it right." But he also senses a "wistfulness" among other students for the glamour of antiwar activism.

A course at the University of California at Santa Barbara deals with the religious dimensions of the war. Some 900 undergraduates are enrolled. At most lectures there is a clutch of Viet Nam vets sitting in the front of the hall wearing bush hats or parts of old jungle fatigues. Sometimes one of them stands up after the lecture and tells his story. A few months ago, a veteran named John Murphy described how just 72 hours before he was to rotate back to the States, he found himself in a fire fight. He and a dozen buddies survived, in part because Murphy attacked a Viet Cong with the only weapon left, his teeth, which he sank into the guerrilla's neck. Soon afterward Murphy was flown home, and was making some travel arrangements in a phone booth in Seattle when he looked up to see "a hairy bastard," presumably an antiwar activist who did not like people in uniform, poised to throw a tomato at him. Murphy bolted toward him, knocked him to the floor and sank his teeth into the man's neck as police pulled him away. No charges were brought. Murphy, now pursuing religious studies, said he had never told that story to anyone for 14 years. After a pause, a student rose in the audience and shouted, "Welcome home, John Murphy!"

The premier issue of a new annual magazine has appeared on some racks. It is called Vietnam Combat, subtitled The Blood, the Guts & the Glory of the American GI. The magazine romanticizes the war and its warriors, details battle strategy, and best of all, for just $2.95, describes the American victory. A considerably more serious project is a 20-volume history, overseen by Robert Manning, former editor of the Atlantic, and distributed by TIME-LIFE Books, called The Vietnam Experience. Originally intended to sell about 120,000 copies, it has stirred enough interest so that its press run will probably be quadrupled.

Meanwhile, ROTC programs are enjoying a popularity that is disconcerting to anyone who remembers the days in the late '60s when such operations were thrown off most U.S. campuses as being virtual agents of fascism. The service academies have up to 45% more applications than in 1979.

Viet Nam takes on different lights and different perspectives when held at a slightly different angle. In a sense, Viet Nam was an unthinkably intricate and insoluble tragedy of lies--lies and exaggerations and distortions on all sides. It was as if the war involved some primal falsification, something like original sin, or else, less grandiosely, a deep incompatibility of cultures --and from that lie others flowed, fluently and poisonously and endlessly.

When all the cultural prisms were laid one upon another, the effects of distortion and mendacity and ignorance made a clear view of the war extremely difficult. For the Viet Cong, often serving the Americans by day and killing them by night, duplicity was the chief weapon of survival. Lyndon Johnson never leveled with the American people about his intentions in the war. He wanted his Great Society too much, he wanted to win both the War on Poverty and the war in Southeast Asia. And Johnson's problem remained America's problem for years: the nation somehow never quite squarely looked at Viet Nam and asked itself what it was doing there. A certain legerdemain was the official style of Viet Nam. Americans deliberately tried to fight without stirring up war passions at home--with the result that the passion, when it came, was one of revulsion. The Americans tried to fight a "limited war." The Vietnamese Communists were fighting an absolute war.

In the field, the Americans were encouraged to lie about their "body counts" (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most purely true thing that can be said about the American war in Viet Nam. It has the tragic grace of the incontestably lost and therefore the incontestably true--the names of those who died in such a context of multiple illusions.

The way that history has played itself out in Southeast Asia has considerably complicated some of the old simplisms of the era, and therefore changed some old opinions. The North Vietnamese, whom Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos once called "the Prussians of Southeast Asia," have imposed a grim, repressive regime throughout the country, but most forcibly upon the South. Ambitious and militaristic and given to a Stalinist style of dogmatism, they have turned the South into a police state. They have even abolished the old National Liberation Front, which they had long billed as the voice of the people in revolutionary South Viet Nam. Though they run one of the poorest nations in the world, the Vietnamese invest their best brains and creativity in the military: they have occupied Cambodia and Laos, resuming a campaign of expansionism that was interrupted more than a century ago when the French arrived to colonize Indochina. It is ironic that the Vietnamese, so often sentimentalized by the American Left as a simple and gentle peasant people, are the imperialists of the region, restlessly putting new Vietnamese settlements in neighboring countries, seeking Lebensraum.

Questions persist that once seemed, at least to the Left, to have simple answers. Did the people of South Viet Nam really want Communism? The 1 million people who have risked their lives to escape the regime have stated their opinion. Did the American bombing of Cambodia, as some contend, really cause Pol Pot's unthinkable holocaust? A Khmer Rouge leader and theoretician named Khieu Samphan actually formulated the ideological foundation for the genocide long before the Americans started bombing. Pol Pot, once in power, set in motion the "Year Zero" program that led to the extermination of one-fourth of the population, some 2 million people, his own countrymen. Such deeds originate not in the American bombing but in a mystery of human behavior that is beyond imagination.

The history of Indochina in the past ten years has silenced many Leftists or put them on the defensive about the way they embraced the idea that America's course in the war was uniquely evil. Some, like Singer Joan Baez, denounced the behavior of the new Vietnamese regime. Jane Fonda is an object of special vilification among veterans. Her husband, California Assemblyman Tom Hayden, once a leader of the New Left, admits, "I am not pure. We have, as Joseph Heller says, two lives: the one we live with and the one we learn with. The consensus on the war is still emerging."

Viet Nam, small and remote and poor, translated into an enormous presence in the American imagination. A backward agricultural country became the theater of one of the great psychodramas in American history. America absorbed Viet Nam into itself. The war brought into brutal view the discrepancies of social class that Americans have always preferred to maintain as a kind of dirty half-secret. Viet Nam was, for America, essentially a class war. The children of the poor and the lower middle class tended to do the fighting. The children of the privileged tended to get draft deferments to go to college, or to bribe doctors to concoct and certify a disability for them.

$ Many antiwar protesters were sincerely trying to find answers to the profound moral questions Viet Nam raised about the legitimate uses of American power, and about the nature of the struggle in Indochina. The questions the war raised--in some ways, still raises--were endless. Were the Americans acting as idealists, honoring a treaty commitment to an ally and defending freedom against Communist aggression? Or were they anti-Communist crusaders who committed atrocities against a land of peasants? Were the North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh austere and virtuous folk heroes, or murderous, Stalinist totalitarians who committed barbarities far worse than those of the Americans and South Vietnamese? Was Southeast Asia a line of dominoes waiting to fall, one after another, before the sinister push of Communism? Or was the region a complexity of nationalities, all different, with mutual historic antagonisms that predated the war and will endure when its 100th anniversary rolls around? Were the Americans a collection of baby killers, or basically honorable men doing their duty when the nation called? Were the soldiers of the peace movement representatives of a uniquely virtuous generation, the most idealistic in history? (The antiwar protests died away when the draft ended in 1973.) Was the South Vietnamese army corrupt and cowardly? (ARVN units did not desert to the other side, and some 240,000 men gave their lives in the fight.)

Viet Nam was a crisis of the American identity. It was often said that Americans lost their innocence there, which, if true, may not have been an altogether bad thing. Innocence allied to great power may be refreshing but can be very dangerous.

If there is a peculiarly American saving grace about the war, it may reside with the 700,000 Indochinese who have come to the U.S., like so many other immigrants and refugees from around the world, and made their lives here. If they were brought to the U.S. by tragedy and the destruction of their past, they are also proceeding with the construction of a future. Like all first- generation immigrants, they fear that their children will lose the old culture. They ask questions in their native language and their children reply in English. In Orange County, Calif., where some 90,000 Vietnamese live, the parents run shops selling jewelry and herbs, ginseng and pickled ginger. They worry that their children are wearing punk hairdos and staying out at night. They send packages of food to their families in Ho Chi Minh City. They think about the past a lot.

So do Americans like Richard Corkan, a disabled veteran who served for two years as a Ranger in I Corps. "I have mixed feelings about it all," says Corkan. He does not have nightmares anymore, but sometimes in the deep of night, he blurts out in his sleep, "Who's on guard?" Sitting in the George N. Meredith V.F.W. Post 924 in Anniston, Ala., Corkan says slowly, "I don't know. Viet Nam just stays on your mind."

Michael Herr, in his book Dispatches, says that "Viet Nam was what we had instead of happy childhoods." Narcissism again. But there is a mature sense in which it is true. Viet Nam may have been a hallucination. It was surely a warning, though one not always easy to read. It was also a kind of national rite of passage, a great power learning Kipling's lesson the hard way. In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer describes how a tribesman chosen to be king must be enchained and thrashed before his coronation. The moral may be that a nation, like a king, needs a little chastening perspective.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles, John F. Stacks/New York and Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago