Given the talk of swift boats, draft dodging and Purple Hearts that has permeated recent American political discourse, a visitor to the U.S. over the past several months could be forgiven for thinking he'd been transported back in time by 30 years.
But though he would have heard all about John Kerry and George W. Bush's Vietnam-era activities, that visitor probably wouldn't have heard something else: a substantive discussion about the broader issues raised by America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
"From my standpoint, I think we do need a very thorough discussion on Vietnam," said sociology Professor Paul Joseph, one of 12 professors to travel through Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia in January 1986 in a trip sponsored by the US-Indochina Reconciliation Project. "But I'm disappointed that, so far, the discussion seems to be only about the individual roles Kerry and Bush played during that time frame."
There's a reason for Americans' heightened interest in the two candidates' Vietnam histories, said Joseph, who is also the director of Tufts' Peace and Justice Studies department. "I think the fact that we're at war makes us more likely to raise questions about the president as commander in chief," he said. "I think there is something about being involved in a war now that makes us want to look at what happened back then."
But unfortunately, Joseph added, the current discussion of "what happened back then" is largely limited to individual activities, and is not as broad or in-depth as it should be.
"There are lots of things in Vietnam that have implications for foreign policy and our use of military force now," Joseph said. "But we really haven't processed them as a society as deeply and as fully as I think we should."
For example, he said, the discussion of war crimes that was once raised by the Vietnam War appears to have receded in the public consciousness, despite that discussion's relevance to the current situation in Iraq.
"There was a record in Vietnam which includes war crimes committed by Americans, as there is in every war - there are rules about war, and those rules are always violated," Joseph said.
One of the individuals raising the issue of those violations following his involvement in the Vietnam War was Kerry. "Senator Kerry, when he testified after his service in Vietnam, talked about U.S. atrocities - not that every American or most Americans participated, but some did," he said.
"It was possible to say that in 1972, but it doesn't seem to be possible to say that now, even though we have soldiers who are complicit in abuse and torture and the killing of civilians," Joseph said.
A Friday Knight Ridder report confirmed Joseph's concerns, stating that between April 5 and Sept. 19, according to the Iraqi interim government's records, twice as many civilians have been killed by U.S. and Iraqi government forces than by insurgents and terrorists. 328 of those 3,487 civilian deaths were women and children.
That discussion of this issue is stifled is unfortunate, Joseph added. "If we were free to look at what the conduct of American soldiers - and all soldiers - was in war, that would also shed light on what's going on now," he said. "But the reluctance now to look at what went on then also makes it more difficult to look at what's going on now."
Another one of Vietnam's legacies - wariness of American military invention abroad for fear of becoming stuck in a prolonged quagmire of instability and insurgency - can also be applied to the current situation in Iraq. Only 138 of the 1,048 U.S. troop deaths in Iraq so far occurred during major combat operations; the other 910 took place after May 2, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that the insurgency in Iraq "is getting worse." Powell's statement followed Reuters, Associated Press, Knight Ridder and other news organizations' reports that an increasing number of areas in Iraq are now considered too dangerous for U.S. troops to enter.
Such American involvement would have been unlikely in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. "In '75, when the war was over, there was a long cloud - the so-called Vietnam Syndrome - placed over the possibility of the U.S. intervening again, especially with ground troops," Joseph said. "The lesson learned from Vietnam - don't use ground troops in missions overseas - persisted for a while."
"But since then, many of the Republican administrations have tried to chip away at the Vietnam Syndrome," he added. "Now, a generation later; the United States can intervene abroad, and has many times. But the question of whether ground troops are used, and the cost and the casualties, is still in the shadow of the Vietnam War."
For example, the question in the public's mind of how many American lives can be "acceptably" lost in a war is rooted in Vietnam - and also thanks to Vietnam, Joseph said, the answer to that question has dwindled.
"We've lost a thousand troops now in Iraq - a big number, but only 1/58 of the troops we lost in Vietnam," he said. "So our perception of costs, I think, is one of the legacies from Vietnam."
Another one of those legacies is the public's skepticism towards its leaders' justifications for war. "The memories of Vietnam potentially have a lot of positives in terms of constraining the U.S. military for the future," Joseph said. "The rhetoric defending Vietnam, a lot of it had to do with the domino theory ... I don't think that kind of rhetoric works as easily now."
"There are much more narrow boundaries for justifying war; it has to be our self-defense," he added. "A lot of the self-defense is alleged in this particular situation, but the terrain for justifying the war is more restrained than it was during the Vietnam era."
Media coverage of the Iraq war reflects another aspect of the Vietnam War's impact: the Pentagon's resultant desire to "change the face of combat that was being shown back in America" by setting "the rules of what reporters are allowed to do and see and file."
"In Vietnam, it was possible many times for journalists to accompany troops to the field," Joseph said. "There's a famous report from 1965, where Morley Safer films troops who are setting fire to a South Vietnamese village. That was shown on television back in the United States."
"But when the U.S. intervened in the Gulf War and then again in Panama, reporters could only go where the Pentagon let them, and the Pentagon controlled their vision of the field," Joseph said.
After the Gulf War, however, that arrangement no longer sat well with reporters, who, Joseph said, would not have agreed to the same terms for the current Iraq conflict.
"So the Pentagon tried to make the best of that by allowing reporters to embed with troops in Iraq," Joseph said. "Some public relations experts said you could actually generate a sympathetic view [of American soldiers] by doing this, and at least in the short run, they were right. It was a successful strategy."
