Everything We Already Know

WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW NOW is the difference. What made Vietnam unique not only in the fighting of it by our soldiers but also in the living of it by our people? All we know now is that the Vietnam War was different and that it did fundamentally alter America and Americans: we need to know now how it changed us.

This is not a political question. The politicians will continue to haggle about the "nobility" or lack thereof of our behavior in southeast Asia. But other, less official sources will ultimately explain what happened to us because of what we did. We may find out a little bit at a time or all at once. It may take a long time--Tolstoy wrote War and Peace about 40 years after Napoleon--or we may never know at all.

Of course, some have tried already, and the results usually have been provocative, if only occasionally enlightening. In A Rumour of War. Phillip Caputo presents an agonizing portrait of individual naivete gone sour, a sort of objective correlative of our government's experience. Dispatches by Michael Herr reveals a lot about Michael Herr and something about the nature of wartime journalism, but little about the war itself.

Perhaps the novel is not right for Vietnam. Gloria Emerson certainly comes as close as anyone to creating the definitive Vietnam work with her passionate profiles of individuals in Winners and Losers. Maybe the right medium is film; but Apocalypse Now veered away from Vietnam too soon to stake a claim, and The Deer Hunter, in its attempt to explain why all wars exist, failed altogether. Or perhaps it's television--a televised benediction for the televised war. But television in America wouldn't ever be willing to risk the necessary time and talent for such a project.

Oral history, the telling of tales through the verbatim transcripts of the participants themselves, in many ways seems a natural vehicle for exploring Vietnam. Oral history can provide a confused, halting narrative for a confused, halting war, through the words of the people who had to implement the insanities ordered from afar. The best thing about Everything We Had, one of two, new oral histories of Vietnam (the other is called Nam), is its cadence, the mesmerizing pace of the explanations of those who had to do unreasonable things and then try to survive them. This befuddlement that cost 57,000 Americans their lives and the nation its serenity dominates the stories of the 31 men and two women who are this book. But for all the virtues of the collection--and there are several--it ultimately falls prey to the problems of the oral history genre and leaves us with more questions than answers.

ALTHOUGH IT APPEALS to the populist in us all, oral history is basically a lazy man's version of the real thing. It is raw material, not finished product. Studs Terkel, who popularized the discipline, combines a sharp editing style and evocative introductions of his speakers to create a picture larger than the transcripts would offer by themselves. Most importantly, however, Terkel picks the right people, the biggest responsibility of the Oral historian.

Al Santoli, the Vietnam vet who compiled Everything We Had, has mastered some of these techniques. His eye for the lucid description is acute, and he has selected remarkably articulate passages. Too articulate, maybe. His list of contributors would indicate that almost every Vietnam veteran either lives in Vermont or writes plays or practices law--not exactly a representative sample from what was very much a working class war. Furthermore, the descriptions of what has happened to these men and women since the war are pitifully inadequate. For example: "Karl Phaler is deputy attorney general for the state of California" or "Robert Rawls is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, where he lives with his family."

The veterans' words are not enough for a 'comprehensive understanding of what the war meant to them. Santoli's reluctance to judge his fellow soldiers, as indicated by the almost non-existent biographies, comes off as diffidence and an abdication of responsibility. Even worse, the meager descriptions are tucked in the back of the book (and incorrectly alphabetized), so one must constantly flip back and forth to see who is talking. This mistake is particularly unfortunate because it hurts the collection's best asset--its penetrating and hypnotizing rhythm.

BUT FOR ALL the organizational faults, there is no denying the power of these stories. The great strength of oral history is its immediacy, its personalization of large, often diffuse, historical forces. It is one thing to hear about corruption and mismanagement and another to read this:

If somebody went out and really broke his ass to try and put up a structure in a village and then was told he couldn't have cement today because the, province chief wants to build a new patio, and knows if he complains he's going to get shot or put in jail on some trumped-up charge, after a while he says. "Fuck it, why bother."

No one knew what they were doing or were supposed to do. In at least one sense. Vietnam was unique in the American military experience because of its formlessness; there were few battles with an enemy army, just small incidents and encounters. These neither began nor ended--they merely continued, interrupted by sporadic lulls. The frustration of this kind of fighting is portrayed with a startling vividness; the explosions within so many Vietnam veterans, whether with drugs or insanity or violence, become all the more understandable. (Yet, because of the inadequate biographies, we never learn what happened to these men.)

The overwhelming feeling seems to be loss of control in every facet of life. Certainly, the brass was not in charge. The stories of incompetence at the front are almost as excruciating to read as to live through--the deaths of 1000 Americans by "friendly fire" in Vietnam seem more than understandable after reading this book. Perhaps even worse, however, was the real leadership of the war in Washington, which comes across as genuinely evil, pathologically, maybe even intentionally inept, driven by what it wanted to see and not what was there. We didn't understand Asian society--not its structure, not its language, nothing--and we couldn't bomb away a culture. The eyes and voices of this book saw the story of America in Vietnam and, for that alone, this book demands attention.

But of the deeper questions we learn litte. Was this war different? Surely, the sentiment of this soldier is not unique to Vietnam:

People join the military for a number of reasons...Some do it because they have nothing better to do. Some do it because they want to find themselves. Some do it because they want to serve their manhood or find their manhood. And some guys do it because they're overcompensating and want to be macho men.

Or this nurse, who watched a young man with a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania die with burns over 90 per cent of his body: "What a wasted, wasted, wasted life." Or this soldier, on his first battle: "I kept thinking, 'If only I could talk to the cocksucker firing at me, we'd get along, everything would be all right.' I just had this overwhelming feeling that...we're just pawns in this fucking thing, throwing the shit at each other." These soldiers seem to distinguish something about Vietnam that set it apart from other wars. Unfortunately, they don't explain what it is. So we must be tantalized by the idea (probably correct, I think) that the ugliness of Vietnam was unique for those who fought it. The answer (if there is one) to the question of what made Vietnam different may not be answerable in a work of non-fiction; perhaps it requires a leap of imagination not within the reach of the historian or journalist. This book, alas, does not even try.

THERE IS an even more critical failing in Everything We Had. It does not even attempt to address the issue of what Vietnam did to America. Santoli has an understandable fascination with battle descriptions, but they are not enough. We need to know what the war did to these men's ideas about their country, for the damage it did to the American dream may be its most enduring legacy. This is the remaining conundrum that the politicians or the historians cannot answer. Everything We Had touches the edges of this question but does not confront it head on. Had it done so, it would have been infinitely more valuable than it is now. Everything We Had tells us much that is worth knowing about the Vietnam War, but nothing that, in the end, we must know about it.