7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

1/7

November 27 1982 1.25;

U.K.

65p

k j

, I

y

I*-.-

T; -

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

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

2/7

558

The

Nation.

November

27,

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

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

3/7

November 27

1982 The

Nation. 559

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-

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

4/7

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

5/7

November 27

982

The

Nation. - 561

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,

PO Box

1953, Morlon

OH 43305

150 ff the newsstand prlce ond 30% off the regular subscrlptlon

YESlllSend me

24

Issues

of The

Nalron for

12 0 0 ,

a savlngs of

prlce I understand that I may cancel ot

any

tlme ond recelvea

refund for

1 1

unmolled coples

My payment IS enclosed-reword me wlth

FOUR FR ADDITIONAL ISSUES1

lease ball me loter

NAME

ADDRESS

(PLEASE

PRINT1

CITY STATE ZIP

SEND THE NATION

TO A FRIEND1 (And save 3 )

Please send

24

Issues of The Natlon to the followlng people at the I

addltlonal

gtft

And send

o

card announclng the subscrlptlon(s)

speclal glft rate of lust 12 for the

f l rs t

and

9

fareach I

GIFTTO

ADDRESS

CITY STATE ZIP

I

GIFTTO I

ADDRESS

CITY TATE

I

I

I

I

I

I

I

nclosed

IS

~ for ~ subscrlptlon(s)

(Extend each subscrlptlon FOUR FR ISSUES

~ l l e loter

Add 13 50

portage for rubscrlpf onr

~n

Canodo and Ms tco,

16

5

for olhsr

tormgn

c o ~ n l r ~ e svbrcrrpllonr poyohls ,n e q ~ \v o le n t 5 funds

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

6/7

562

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.

7/24/2019 November 13, 1982

7/7