REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Vietnam and Other American Fantasies
By H. Bruce Franklin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2000
256 pp, $59.95 (hb)
Elvis is alive and living in Los Angeles. Our planet is regularly visited by extraterrestrial beings who abduct humans for sexual experiments. The tooth fairy leaves money under the pillows of children who have lost a tooth. Many of society's fantasies are wacky but harmless but some, however, are at the harmful end of the world of make-believe such as the belief by two-thirds of Americans that US prisoners of war are still being held by Vietnam a quarter of a century after the end of the war.
As Bruce Franklin argues in his book on Vietnam War fantasies, these US POWs, hidden from the world and routinely tortured by sadistic Asian Communists, are imaginary beings who have been implanted in the collective imagination through a political and cultural campaign designed to justify the barbaric war waged by the United States against Vietnam and to psychologically compensate US patriots for their humiliating defeat at the hands of Asian Reds.
The POW myth has become a national religion for the faithful, with the POW flag flying over the White House, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, corporate headquarters and shopping malls, and its symbolic image adorning the white robe of the Ku Klux Klan, coffee mugs, T-shirts and Christmas tree ornaments. The POW myth is the official reason why every post-war administration has reneged on the 1973 peace treaty pledge by the US to pay Vietnam US$4 billion in reparations. And it was one of the excuses for waging political and economic warfare against Vietnam for 20 years after the end of military hostilities.
The myth was invented in 1968 by President Richard Nixon as a device to deadlock peace negotiations and to counteract the anti-war movement. To the POW category, Nixon roped in those classified as Missing In Action whose bodies could not be recovered, thus permanently keeping alive the absurd but undisprovable possibility that every MIA is a potential POW.
In the early '80s, the Hollywood dream factory weighed in with its considerable talents in fantasy-making. POW rescue movies took revenge against the Vietnamese with rugged heroes like Gene Hackman in Uncommon Valor, Chuck Norris in Missing in Action and Sylvester Stallone in his Rambo oeuvre slaughtering hordes of cowardly Asian Reds and thus demonstrating the virility and martial prowess that so failed the weak bureaucrats, politicians and hippy peaceniks who caused the war to be lost.
These movies were based on real life "rescue" missions into Laos by an ex-Special Forces colonel in the early '80s and which were funded by such Hollywood luminaries as Ronald Reagan (then starring as President), Clint Eastwood (in Dirty Harry avenger mode) and William Shatner. Shatner was right at home as Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek TV series which screened from 1966 to 1969. In its early episodes, Star Trek portrayed the establishment political view about the war, showing, for example, that the peace movement was dangerously misguided because Evil (the Klingons/Communists) must be fought by Good (the Federation/United States) wherever the dominoes threatened to tumble.
Under the impact of the political crisis generated by the war, especially following the Tet offensive by the Vietnamese liberation forces in early 1968 which showed that the US could not win the war, Star Trek changed its tune. In one post-Tet episode, for example, the struggle between Yangs and Kohms (the symbolism was not subtle) for control of the planet Omega IV had turned the good Yangs into savage barbarians and threatened the existence of the planet. Only an end to the war could guarantee the triumph of true American ideals in the 23rd Century of the USS Enterprise.
Although the Star Trek writers now joined dozens of other science fiction writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov in publicly declaring themselves in favour of US withdrawal, there were limits to the Trekkies' transformation. Evil empires still existed and should be fought with the wonders of technowar (phasers, photon torpedoes and the rest), a strategy which had gruesome success in the Gulf War in 1991 but which carries its own fantasy of surgically clean war eliminating the gore of old-fashioned blood-and-guts wars like Vietnam.
Back in the USA, fantasy has ruled the establishment's response to the anti-war movement. The mantra that the US lost the war because it had "one hand tied behind its back" is particularly grotesque. The firepower ranged against Vietnam was so phenomenal that its cost helped drive the powerful US economy into crisis and the establishment political and media consensus in favour of the war was unwavering.
The concept of "betrayal", however, does pick up on the social divisions caused by the war and reflects the decisive role of the domestic anti-war movement to the US losing the war through the movement's contribution to the collapse of its conscript army's morale and hence military fighting capability in the combat zone.
Nevertheless, the establishment seeks to denigrate and underplay the nature and extent of opposition to the war. Hollywood has Forrest Gump/Tom Hanks beating up contemptible anti-war activists like the SDS leader at Berkeley and the line is peddled that opposition was limited to noisy minorities on campuses like Berkeley.
The universities certainly were centres of militancy (Professor Franklin, for one, was sacked from Stanford University "for urging and inciting disruption of campus activities"), but opposition to the war has been shown to be inversely proportional to wealth and income. Blue-collar workers were more likely than those with a college education to favour withdrawal, though a sizable majority of both opposed the war.
Nixon's "silent majority" of war supporters was a figment of a desperate mind. Every successful presidential candidate — Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon — had to present themselves as some kind of peace candidate in order to get elected because they knew the American people did not support the war.
Opposition to the war within the military was also widespread. Draft resistance and the mobilisation of veterans against the war were significant but political opposition within the active-duty ranks was also crucial, though it has been suppressed from popular knowledge.
There was a massive desertion rate, and the petitions, protests, boycotts, combat refusals, sabotage, mutinies, and anti-war newspapers and organisations amongst soldiers and sailors flourished. At a Christmas show at the US base at Long Binh in 1968, for example, when Bob Hope introduced the commanding General in Vietnam, all 30,000 troops present stood and gave the "V" sign of the peace movement. The highly militant sailors in the US Navy consistently delayed or prevented ships, including aircraft carriers, from sailing to Vietnam.
Some sub-political symptoms of the military's disaffection with the war have, however, escaped the net of military censorship including the endemic drug use and the 76 deaths and 700 injuries from "fragging" (tossing fragmentation grenades into the tents of unpopular officers who risked the lives of their men). The troops had had enough of a dangerous, interminable and unwinnable war. The human cogs of the US war machine were unwilling and unable to do their job.
Attempts to rewrite the meaning and course of the Vietnam War have utilised fantasy, suppression and other techniques of ideological control to obscure or reverse the realities of the war. They have had considerable success but not enough to erase the "Vietnam Syndrome" (the unwillingness of the US public to risk high casualty rates by committing ground troops to prolonged foreign wars). And certainly not enough to erase the stubborn reality that after many savage years of unrelenting terror by the US state, in the end the US ambassador in Vietnam had to crawl up to the helicopter pad on the embassy roof in Saigon looking for a way to flee.