TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/03119916.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 171 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 52

THE HOME FRONT

Exorcising an Old Demon


A stunning military triumph gives Americans something to cheer
about -- and shatters Vietnam's legacy of self-doubt and
divisiveness

By STANLEY W. CLOUD


    Hello, Kuwait. Goodbye, Vietnam. Next month 16 years will
have passed since Americans and their friends scrambled from
rooftops into helicopters and left Saigon to Vietnam's
victorious communists. The pain of that and so many other
Vietnam memories -- the dead children of My Lai, the shock of
Tet '68, the coups and countercoups, the fraggings, the drugs,
the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of American students at
Kent State -- somehow only increased as the years passed. When
the U.S.-led forces raced across Kuwait and Iraq last week,
however, they may have defeated not just the Iraqi army but
also the more virulent of the ghosts from the Vietnam era:
self-doubt, fear of power, divisiveness, a fundamental
uncertainty about America's purpose in the world.

    The need for such an exorcism must have been felt by the
anonymous U.S. Marine who, shortly after Kuwait City's
liberation, paid a call on the deserted American embassy. He
carried with him an old American flag, which he left at the
gate of the embassy compound. Asked why by an Associated Press
reporter, the Marine said the flag had been given to him 23
years earlier by a dying comrade in Vietnam. For the Marine in
Kuwait City, and for many Americans who took justified pride
in the U.S.'s military performance in the gulf, a circle had
been completed, a chapter closed.

    The crowds across the country that cheered the President's
cease-fire announcement -- and his declaration that "by God,
we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all" -- were
celebrating far more than Saddam Hussein's defeat. They were
savoring the country's first major military victory since 1945.
"This largely puts Vietnam behind us," says political-science
professor Joe Cooper of Rice University. "We have the
confidence now that we can define foreign policy objectives and
carry them out. This will have the same effect as World War II."

    In Vietnam, says Tip Hale, a Chicago insurance salesman, "we
didn't have a cause that united everyone. Bush did it right.
He got the cooperation of other countries, brought the U.N. in
and let the experts run the war . . . If there was a war you
could be proud of, this was it." Republican pollster Robert
Teeter predicts that the gulf victory will especially affect
the attitudes of young Americans. "These are people who had not
seen the country either lead or succeed in a big way on
anything for a long time, whether it was Vietnam or economic
competition," says Teeter. "Now they've seen us succeed."

    The Vietnam experience has been on the minds of Americans
from the day George Bush dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia last
August. The President took pains to vow that the mistakes of
the only war the U.S. ever lost would not be repeated in the
gulf. And they were not. From the massive and rapid military
deployment to Bush's decision to seek formal congressional
approval for the war, from the Pentagon's avoidance of macho
rhetoric to the insistence by antiwar protesters that they
supported U.S. troops, Americans of all sorts seemed determined
to get it right this time. To the extent that any of Vietnam's
bitter aftertaste was present, it was in the tension between
the press and the military. And even that had dissipated to
some extent by last week, when General H. Norman Schwarzkopf
delivered his extraordinary briefing in Riyadh.

    During Vietnam, generals like William Westmoreland and
politicians like Lyndon Johnson paid a heavy price for their
errors, misjudgments and deceptions. In contrast, the U.S.'s
gulf war leaders -- especially Bush, Defense Secretary Dick
Cheney, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Schwarzkopf --
will reap rich political and professional rewards. The odds
favoring Bush's re-election have increased dramatically in the
past few days, and the silence from Democrats who were once
thought all but certain to run against him has become
conspicuous. In fact, the only jarring political news for Bush
out of the war so far has been the finding in some recent polls
that a lot of Americans would like to see Colin Powell replace
Dan Quayle as the President's running mate next year.

    Bush and the brass aren't the only ones who will benefit.
In towns across the nation, troops from the gulf war are sure
to be received as heroes. From New York City to San Diego,
local officials are laying plans for mass rallies and parades
for the returning troops. "It's going to be a hell of a welcome
bout," says Jim Schroder, president of the chamber of commerce
in Oceanside, Calif., home of Camp Pendleton. The brass bands,
speeches and ticker tape are a far cry from the shame and
silence that greeted Vietnam veterans, who came home feeling
they had no choice but to slink back into "the world."

    The terrible feeling of having been abandoned by a nation
that had sent them to war caused a certain ambivalence in some
Vietnam veterans and their families as they witnessed the
sudden victory in the gulf. Louisville attorney Pat Durham,
whose husband Ronald was killed in Vietnam, recalls how their
son Billy tearfully concluded that "my dad died for nothing."
Billy Durham is now 28, and served with the 1st Infantry
Division in Saudi Arabia. His mother is confident that the
memory of Vietnam will not dampen the celebration or mute the
hurrahs when he returns. "This country can be very proud," Pat
Durham says. "I don't think we could have had a better cause
to fight for."

    Some will doubtless conclude that the rightness of the cause
and the swiftness of the victory have restored America to its
pre-Vietnam place in the world, and that potential adversaries
should consider themselves fairly warned. "Anyone will have to
think twice about messing with the U.S. again," says Detroit
advertising executive William Miller, who had initially opposed
the gulf war. "Before a dictator attacks another country, he
will have to look down the barrel of Uncle Sam's gun." It has
been some time since talk like that has been heard, and
believed, in the U.S. Wrote humorist Lewis Grizzard in the
Atlanta Journal and the Constitution: "I think there ought to
be a national day of gloating."

    In the early '60s, John F. Kennedy proclaimed that the U.S.
had "a problem in making power credible, and Vietnam is the
place." Vietnam was not the place. But was the gulf? Last week
George Bush declined to say so. Rather, he described the
military result as "a victory for all the coalition partners
. . . for the United Nations, for all mankind, for the rule of
law and for what is right." The President was merely being
diplomatic, of course, which was only fitting, since diplomacy
had played an important part in assuring Iraq's defeat. But the
fact is that this war fulfilled the dream John Kennedy had
enunciated for Vietnam: it demonstrated not just that America
is powerful but that it is credibly so.

    There is a potential danger that the U.S., having rapidly
and easily defeated Iraq, might be tempted to go for its guns
too quickly in the future. "I don't think the nation's shame
about Vietnam was such a bad thing," says Harvard Law School
student Morris Ratner, 24. "To the extent that it kept the U.S.
from playing international cowboy, it was a good thing.
Unfortunately, I think this war will make future
Administrations far less reticent in using force to deal with
international problems."

    Other voices of caution can be heard in the midst of all the
cheering. "I'm not convinced that our military will be
invincible forevermore," says Patrick Santana, a graphic
designer in Boston. Los Angeles city councilman Zev
Yaroslavsky, a liberal antiwar activist in the '60s who has
supported the gulf war, takes a somewhat different tack: "If
the Vietnam experience prevented the United States from
asserting itself in issues of high moral purpose, and some
people would say that it has, then this diminishes that
reluctance. But if Vietnam has made us careful about asserting
our influence -- I hope that doesn't leave us."

    Probably it won't. Americans were haunted by Vietnam, but
they also learned from it. For proof of that, there is no need
to look any further than the meticulous way in which George
Bush and his military and civilian team went about engineering
their stunning, quick triumph in the desert.