november 13, 1982
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EDITORIAL
THE
PIPELINE
If Ronald Reagans gas pipeline sanctions were
worth their weight
in
hot air in the first place,
they are worth keeping. If hey are not worth
keeping, they were not worth their weight In hot
air in the first place. What the President cannot
pretend is that he was right both ways. Yet this is
exactly what he does pretend.
Never mind that the French would ot be a par-
ty to the agreement,nor that theWest Germans
preserve a tactful silence on the matter. Never
mind that, from an Administration that believes
itself tested by each new Soviet action, this is
a contemptibly short-sighted andhalf-baked
move. The President pretends tdat all is well.
He could have appeared tough but inflexible.
He could have appeared flexible but erratic. It
takes a real operator to get the worst of both
worlds-adamant for drift, asChurchill once
put it, and resolved only to be irresolute.
The ludicrous symmetry of the pipeline affair
tells us something worth remembering about the
futility
of
this Administrations thoughtless
policies. The country was never told by Reagan
what he hoped to achieve by the pipeline sanc-
tions, and now it doesnt really know why they
were lifted. Were the sanctions imposed to
punish the Soviet Union for its actions in
Afghanistan, or Poland?
Or
did Reagan wish to
teach our European allies a lesson in who is
master? Either way,his eversal has changed
nothing. The Russians are still in Afghanistan,
their military satraps in power in Poland. The
Europeans are still defiantly insisting that, they
have the right to trade wherever they want.
If Reagan intended the removal of the sanc-
tions as a signal
of
reconciliation to the new
Soviet leaders, he didnt say so. If he had, we
would applaud. As it is, we can only conclude
that this s another Reagan policy that began
without clear purpose and has ended as
it
began.
FROM
THEIR
SPECI LPAIN
WHAT
THE
PETER
MARIN
The dedication of the Vietnam veterans me-
morial on the Washington Mall two weeks ago
aroused the familiar controversies about Its de-
sign and its cultural and political functions,
echoing many of t he points of view about the
war that remain among us. There is very little
one can say about the monument itself. Its clean
lines demand contemplation rather than patriot-
ism or veneration, and perhaps
no
one can argue
with that; bu t they do very little to remind Amer-
icans about he actual nature of the Vietnam
War-the horrorsandcorruptlon, the moral
culpability and negligence, the excesses-or
about their own country.
One cannot be surprised by that, of course.
Roland Barthes pointed out long ago that a cul-
tures myths serve two functlons a t once: they
commemorate the past but
also
disguise it, they
make it both more and less than it was, they
erode history and with it the palpable truths
of
specific human action and its consequences. It is
much the same with monuments or memorials.
These are the material ways societies mytholo-
gize the past, making it a part of memory rather
than thought, anobject of sentiment rather than
sentience. The Vietnam memorial
is
no
excep-
tion, and the fact that we do the same thing in
America makes us no worse than anyone else;
one can hardly expectmages of napalmed
children and weeping parents to remind
u
of what
the war was really like. And it is true, too, that
there are
so
many veterans currently in one sort
of
distress orkanother that one ought not to be
overly scrupulous about anything that may, like
the memorial, alleviate it.
Continued on
Page
558
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98
terms, Ch an Kin is teaching the simple trut h tha t when you
tamper with the roots of a rich but fragile ecosystem such as
the rain forest, you endanger all the others.
Inaddition o he bulldozers,oil rigs havebegunex-
ploratory drilling in Pic0 de
Oro
which is on the dge
of
the
2,400-square-mile Lacandon preserve. I t 1s only
a
matter
of
time before the black goldwill be pumped up from beneath
the forest floor
In return for this exploitation, the Lacan dones hav ebeen
given clinics and schools. The north ern settlement of Na ha,
with a little more than 100 inhabitants, has already bought
three trucks with the revenue fro m its mah oga ny trees, and
it wont be long before every Laca ndo n will own a ape
recorder
or
radio. More and more government dignitaries
will pay regular visits to t he mo dernized settlements, along
with the regularplaneloads of American,German nd
French tourists.
T.Jnlrke thehlghlandMayas
of
Guatemala, the Lacan-
done5 ale being suffocated by government iargesst, even as
their orest
s
decimated and theirsacredceremonies are
profaned by tourists andbureaucrats. Likemanyother
aboriginal peoples before them, they are becomingkind of
official mascot, with a built-in public relation s value.
If, as seems likely, theatrocities against theMayas of
Guatemala cont inue to mount and the Lacandones cont inue
to be patronized and exploited ou t of their 4,000-year-old
ethnic heritage, then the
1980s
ma y well be remembered by
future gene rations as having marked the extinction of the
remnants
of
one of the great ancient civilizations t o have
flourished in ou r hemisphere.
Continued From Front Co ver)
And yet, having said that, one must say something more.
It would be unfortunate for usall, including th e veterans, if
the mem orial had the effect of closing the d oor on the past
or
trying to heal the wounds left behind-as if,
in
the words
of a veteran I met recently, everything was all right now,
all hunky-dory, were all friends again and all that shit, and
the war itself will be forgotten. For we have not, asa peo-
ple, really come to terms with the moral question s raised by
the war
or
understood the essons it oug ht to ave taught us.
And we have not begun to come to terms ith what the vets
are only now, as the war gradually recedes into the past,
beginning to learn a bo ut themselves and can perhaps teach
the rest of
us.
That 1s why it seems to me important not to worry too
much about the memorials design, nor even t o concentrate
on the horrors of war an d the plight of the vets, but rathe r
to reflect upon theknowledge and wisdom tha t at east
a
few
men have begun in private to mine from the war.
I
cannot
speak here abo ut all vets, or even most
of
them, so I will
concentrate on themen I met thls September in Rochestert
Peter Marin
S
a w riter and a leacher wh o is current
y
at
work o n a book titled
Conscience and the Comm onG d.
the first New York State convention of the Vietnam Veter
ans of America, which
I
was invited to atte nd because o
what
I
had previously written a bou t veterans. Technically
what I have to say applies only to the
300
or
so
vets at th
convention,and obviously t is not rueof allvets . Th
V. V A. as an organiz ation is rather radical, or a t least it
leaders and several of its chapters are, but even amon g i
members there are
many
different attitudes toward the pa
many of the men are antiwar an d antigovernment, but m
others believe
or
try t o believe) that the war was necessar
and ju st and their ow n roles justifiable. Yet whatever the
differences, they havecertaincharacteristics incommon
and
I
have met enough other ets to know that there must
countless others like them scattered across the country, an
that what
I
saw in Rochester mu st be going o n elsewhere
W hat impresses me most abo ut the vets
I
know is the se
sibility that has emerged am ong them in recent vears: a pa
ticular ind of tnoraleriousness whch
is
unusual
America, one which 1s deepened and defined by the fact th
it has emerged from
a
direct confrontation not only ith th
capacity of others
for
violence and brutality but also wi
thelr own culpability, their sense of their own capacity fo
erro r and excess. Precisely th e same kinds of experience
tha t have produced in some vets the complex constellation
of panic from which they seem unable to recover have e
gendered in others an awareness of moral complexity an
hum an tragedy unlike anything one is likely to find els
where in America toda y.
It 1s thls underlying seriousness, I think, hat accounts,
amo ng other effects, for the ways these veterans treat on
ano ther . Whatever their behavior-and it is often skeptica
joking, an affectionate oughhouslng-there emains a
undercurrent
of
easygoing and generous concern,
or
care,
o
what onemight even call how one hesltates o use the wo rd
love.
I
remember two instances of it in partlcular. The first w
a talk given by Gary Beikirch, a Medal of Honor winne
who is now president
of
the Genesee Valley V.V.A. cha p
ter. H e describedhissense
of
isolationandhumiliation
in the years after the war, somehow Intensified by the med
he had gotten
so
much for the dream that appreciation
will ma ke the vets feel better). And then he alked ab o
what it had been like to make tentatwe contactwith the ve
in heRochester grou p and o discover among hem he
camaraderie he needed. What he described was
a
kind
healingsimilar to hat which some vets in outreach pro
grams and rap groups have provided for one another.
Th e second occasion was the appearance, at the start
the final nights dinner, of a black vet who had apparentl
walked in off the street uninvited with his wife and child
tow . He m ade his way to the microphone an d, while bra
dishing a baseball bat, began to speak:
I
aint here to ma
trouble, I dont wanna
have
any rouble, but
I
gotta te
you,
I
need help. I got
a
wife,
a
kid, I got no job,
I
dont b
long anywhere, theres
no
on e will give me any help.
The vets to a man had been tensed for trouble, but now,
suddenly, two or three came up to h im anded him to a tab
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and invited his wife and child to join them, and he became
part of their group. And at- he microphone Bobby Muller,
the national V.V.A. head, whose turn it was to speak,
smiled and said from his wheelchair: Listen, bro, youre
gonna come to
our
big convention next year in Washington,
you hear me? But thats a big one, so bring more than a
baseball bat. Youll need your heavy artillery.
These are vets who have, quite literally, brought one
another back from the dead, often saved one another from
suicide. Their relationships are full of a tenderness and
generosity that is rare among American men-at least in
public. Sometimes they themselves are blissfully unaware
of it; at others, when they notice it, they seem astonished.)
I
cannot remember seeing anything like it save among black
college students in the late 1960s or among civil rights
workers and elderlylacks in theouth or-oddly
enough-among the members of a fraternity to which I
belonged rn the 1950s, who seemed, beyond all rhetoric, to
be genuinely brotherly toward one another.
It is this capacity for generosity, this kind of learned con-
cern, which colors their moral sensibility,
as
if there were
stilllat work in them a moral yearningor innocence that had
somehow been deepened, rather than destroyed, by the war.
A few days after I came home from my stay with he vets, a
friend asked me: Well, what is it they really want? And
I
said, without thinking, Justice. That is what they want,
but it is not justice for themselves-though they would like
that too. They simply want justice to exist, for there to be
justice in the world: some moral order, a moral order main-
tained by other men and women one can trust. Their yearn-
ing is made all the more poignant by the fact that they still
do not understand that if justice isto exist, they will have to
be the ones who creafe rather than receive it. They do not
yet-not yet-see it as their own work, not because they are
lazy, but simply because it is not a role they associate with
themselves. Like most Americans, they do not have a sense
of themselves aS makers and sustainers of moral values,
even though, without knowsing t, that s what many of them
have become.
I remember how, at the closing banquet, the vets rose and
applauded each speaker, movedby the sentiments they
heard. There came a moment when a former South Viet-
namese major, attending the convention uninvited, came up
to the dais to offer a plaque to Gary Beikirch. He said that
someday the vets would have to return to Vietnam to finish
the job they had started but had been forced to stop. With-
out thinking, on cue, the whole room stood and applauded,
the vets and their wives and friends and guests. Yet it was
obviously not
a
sentiment most of them really shared, and
later they laughed sheepishly about their enthusiasm. What
it revealed was how susceptible the vets are-as, in a sense
we all are-to rhetoric and ritual and what the moment
seems to demand. It is, paradoxically, the vets yearning for
goodness, for something to believe, which fuels their desire
for justice but also makes them vulnerable to rhetoric and
ritual, just as it did long ago when t h e went off to war.
One must remember: these were he good children. Sever-
al of themhad fathers whoserved in World War11 and
passed on t o them
a
sense of obligatim and a belief in the
glory
of
war. Many others-a surprising number, in fact-
were Catholics who were inspired at an early age by John
Kennedys call to ask what you can do for your country;
in fighting Communism one must not forget how rigorous-
ly
at the time American Catholicism was intent on confront-
ing Communism everywhere), they would satisfy not only
their parents, teachers and priests but also God and the
Pope and the President-all at once. They were, in short,
those whose faith in their elders, and in American myths
and the American order of things, was so strong, so inno-
cent, thatwar seemed beyond alldoubt
a
good thing, a form
of virtue.
And largelybecause their beliefwas
so
strong at the
start-not only in he war but in all authority-their disillu-
sionment and subsequent sense of loss were much tronger.
One is tempted to call this an orphan effect. They were
cut off from any sustaining world. Church, state, parents,
politicians, Army officers-all the hierarchical sources of
moral truth and authoritydissolved around them during the
war, leaving them exposed without consolation to the stark
facts of human culpability and brutality.
I
remember a re-
mark I heard a vet make a year or two ago. He had said that
he wondered if the Vietnamese people would ever forgive
him for what he did. When someone asked whether hewor-
ried about God forgiving him, he answered,My problem is
that I havent yet learned how to forgive
God.
When
I
am asked, as I often m, why the Vietnam War
so
much affected-and so adversely affected-these young
men,
I
am always surprised by the question, because the
answers seem to me so obvious.
In the first place,
it is
probable that all wars have devas-
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the most part remain
so
isolated,
so
locked into their own
pain, that there are few avenues for what is within them to
mak e its way into the larger world,
or
be sustained an d re-
fined by the argerworld.
I f
someonesomewhere would
take the trouble to draw forth from the veterans what it is
they feel, think and know , o r to convince them to speak,
all
of us would be better off.
It is probably rue, as KarI Jaspers pointed out almost
four decades ago in alking to the Ge rma n people abou t
guilt, th at people ca n look closely at their own moral guilt
only when othe rs around them a re willing to consider
thew
lives in the same way. This
1s
precisely wh at the vets have
been denied, and ther efor e their seriousness-which ou gh t
to afford them entrance into the larger world, connecting
them to all those others who have thought about an d suf-
fered similar things-does not. They can not loca te men or
women willing to ake them a s seriously as they take the
questions that plague them.
T ha t
s
what seems
so
wasteful, and there is something
almost unforgivable abou t it.
I
have seen similar kinds
of
wasteover and over in Americaduring thepast several
decades: among children, whose sense of community a nd
fair play
1s
allowed totrop hy r is conscientiously
discouraged; In universities, whe re he best an d deepest
yearnings of students go unacknowledged
o r
untapped ; even
in literature, where, with very few exceptions, the capacities
for generosity and concern which aboun d unrecognized in
most men and women have gone unexamined. But for this
to happen to the vets is perhap s the greatest waste
of
all,
since, in many of them,
so
much understanding has
so
ob-
viously emerged fro m their experience.
Wh at astonishes me is tha t this situation
1s
being ignored
by theAme rican intellectual com mun ity, even by those
whose resistance to the war was based o n moral principles
and doubts. The quandaries of the vets, a nd their pain-a
pain they bear fo r t he rest of the nation that now refuses to
-con front it-certainly dema nd he attention of intelligent
men and women. And their quandaries and pain also pro-
vide the best subject I know-the most real, the mo st im-
mediate-for the kind of moral speculation and self-inves-
tigationonewouldhave expected to see in thewake
of
the war.
But most of the intellectuals concerned with the war have
largely ignored he vets; R obert ayLifton ndGloria
Eme rson are the only intellectuals
I
know who have made
theeffort to contact hem directly and help hem hink
through their condition. And effort s what it takes, because
the lines between American castes are
so
clearly drawn , and
our acquiescence to them so nearly comp lete, that there is
no natural way for vets and intellectuals to come together.
There is, in effect, et
of
social pass-book laws
at
work-not overt, of course, but implicit,
so
deeply internal-
ized and so much take n for granted that we never notice it.
Friends tell me that the vets are probab ly better
off
be-
cadse of this, since most ntellectuals ar e so limited in
understanding and generosity. Perhaps that is true; it may
well be tha t the intellectuals
I
am talking about e xist o nly n
my mi nd . Still, as limited as the intellectual world may be,
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TheNation. November 27 198
there are people within it whose intelligence and unders tand-
ing of moral issues would, if coupled with generosity and
compassion, be
of
immense use to the vets. R obert Coles
is one, for instance, and Arthur Miller, J oh n Seeley an d
I.F. Stone are others. A few hours with any one of these
men might save some ets month s and month s
f
agonizing.
The fact that uch contacts are not often mad eesults in a
double
loss.
The first loss is to the vets themselves. I often
find myself telling them th at they are not likely to find any-
where the kinds
of
help they want o r need, and that what-
ever moral wisdom A merica gains from the war will result
from their efforts and theirs alone. But the fact that I tell
them they must d o it on their own does not m ean that I be-
lieve they will be able to do it . ithout som eone to listen to
them, many vets may not accept their right or responsibility
to speak openly abou t m oral questions.
Gloria Emerson points out that the vets are hampered in
this regard as much by their sense of class as by anything
else, and she is probably ight.Most vets went into the
Army right ou t of high school and were not the kids who
wouldhavegone to college-not the g oo d colleges,
anyway. They were taught by American institutions to re-
main mute, to refrain from turning into words what they
know or feel. They have, still, in relation to experts and
intellectuals and academics the odd combination of disdain
and exaggerated awe that they had in the Armyn relation to
authority. They were schooled systematically to d ou bt the
authenticity of their own perceptions an d sensibilities; they
do not think they have the right to speak; they do no tkn ow
the tricks of the intellectual and public trades; and they
do
not think that what they say will make much dlfference.
Mos t importan t, the vets lack, because they can not reach
those who m ight provide it,
a
context for wha t they feel.
They have little sense o f the ways in wh ich their su ffering is
like the suffering
of
others,
so
they feel more separated and
idiosyncratic than they really are. Wh atm any f the vets felt
when they returned from Vietnam, for instance; was differ-
en t in intensity but not in kind fro m what many returning
Peace Corps workersfelt: both found thesurface of Ameri-
can life surrealistically absurd, somehow less than fully
human, notworthy of the seriousness they knew within
themselves. An d much of wha t the ets suffer is attenda nt to
all those who live on the margins of society, free of its domi-
nan t myths; an d this, after all, is something abou t which
some writers and a rtists know.
Beyond that, most of the vets, though confronted by the
deepest philosophicalquestions,have little knowledge of
philosophy or of the great and grave human texts in whicb
over centuries other men an d w omen have created a tradi-
tion of con cern. Th e greatest thinkers ab ou t guilt, for in-
stance, have been theologians and novelists. Sophocles,
Kierkegaard, C onrad in The Heart of Darkness, Dostoyev-
sky in Crime and Punishmentand Tolstoy in War and Peace
have all placed at the very heart
of
human existence the
issues that plague the vets.
The vets suffering, in sum,has in factbrought hem
closer to the heart of their culture than anything else might
have done, but how can they know that, and , knowing i
how can they make use of it?
For
most of them, the dee
seriousness visited upon them, which ought to mak e them
feel more fully hum an, has merely served to isolate hem
and to make themeel like monsters and pariahs rather th
men.
The other losers are the intellectuals themselves, becaus
much
of
what the vets have to say would be of use
to
thos
who to ok the time to listen. W hat confron ts the vets, afte
all, is the sam e m oral landscape that c onfronts us all, a s
of ambiguities,onfusions and inadequacies that ru
through our culture from top to botto m. I remember onc
describing to
a
woman friend, a writer, how it was the ve
felt. But thats it, tha ts it exactly, he said. Tha ts how
felt having myabortions,after heabortions.Thesame
sense
of
significance and m eaning. Th e same sense of isol
tion-no one on either side of the question to understan
how
I
felt. The difficulty in straightening it ou t in my mind
the loneliness
of
havlng no one whowould forgive me an
also understand my refusal to forgive myself.
The vets difficulty in coming to terms with their ow
past, coupled with their refusal to put it aside, their stub-
bornness in clinging to its Inchoate power, is no t very dl
ferent from the even more hidden yearnings and sorrows
o
many Americans about many things-yearnings and so
rows for which we no longer have a usable language, an
whlch no longer form as they once would have) the cent
of our conversations about what
it
means to be human.
Wh at is more, the vets loss of the myths that ordinari
protect people from the truth has broughthem face to fac
.with several problems that beleaguer almost all those wh
app roach value fro m a secular position: hedifficulty
o
dealing with questions of, go od an d evil in the absence
o
divine, absolute and binding powers or systems. We hav
learned by now-or we should have-that hum ans kill Ju
as easily in Gods absence as they d o in his name, and th
the secularization ofvalue, which people believed a hund r
years ago might set them free
of
ignorance and supersti t i
leads along its own paths to ignorance and superstition. T
be absolutely honest, none
of
us who are secular thinke
have anything more han the tatters f past certainty
to
off
in regard t o establishing and sustaining morality, or increa
ing kindness in men an d women and justice in the worl
Thesequestions, which plague the vets, oug ht o plagu
every thinking man and woman, and none of us can affo
to
ignore the vets experience.
In the end , what we owe the dead whether our own
r
th
Vietnamese), what we owe the vets and what we owe ou
selves is the same thing: the resumption
f
the recurrent co
versation abou t moral values, the sources and meaning o
conscience, and the root s of h um an gen erosity, solidarit
and comm unity. If the Vietnam memorial manages to r
mind
us
tha t this is what is missing an d what must be begu
tha t is fine. If not, hen it will become-no matter ho
moving
or
lovely-simply anothe r mea ns by which, in th
name of m emory, we destroyheast.
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