The 10th anniversary of the fall of...

The 10th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam coincides almost exactly with the 40th anniversary of the fall of Nazi Germany. V-E day came on May 8, 1945, but Adolf Hitler had committed suicide on April 30, the very date on which, 30 years later, the last evacuation helicopter would twist away from America’s abandoned, panicked friends on the Saigon earth below.

World War II dominated our understanding of the Vietnamese War. South Vietnam was an “ally” whom we had gone to support against a brutal foreign invader; but when we got there, the brutal invader was not foreign, and, worse, we found ourselves doing much of the fighting alone. Where was the gallant ally? The World War II model required him to be there, and so--by “Vietnamization”--we set out to create him. Imagine, in the early 1940s, Britannicizing the battle for Britain or Gallicizing the French resistance. A joke, but it hurt too much to laugh.

Reading newspapers and magazines and watching television specials on this double anniversary, one might easily enough conclude that the anniversary of the defeat means more to this country than the anniversary of the victory. But book publishing tells another story. To be sure, on April 28, the Book Review will feature the six Vietnam books announced today on Page 8. In effect, we shall publish a special Vietnam issue. But this issue will not reflect what publishers are actually offering.

Book publishers do no formal market research. Their publishing decisions represent only an educated guess about what the American public wants. It is notable nonetheless that book publishing seems collectively to guess that what the American public wants is more books about World War II. The Los Angeles Times receives for review, by my rough estimate, three World War II books to every two Vietnamese War books, and those three are joined by another two or three Holocaust books. When America wants to read a war book, in short, World War II is the war it most wants to read about. If Herman Wouk had set his “Winds of War” in Southeast Asia, he would not have sold as many copies as he did. Europe is more familiar than Asia. Victory is more agreeable than defeat.

Will this market change? I think it may, but only if two conditions are met. First, American writers must take artistic possession of the new facts of war. War may remain, as Ernest Hemingway said, “the best subject of all.” It may be true, as he said, that war “groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.” But the distinctive wars of our day are not wars of one nation against another. They are wars by governments against their own peoples.

The facts of this kind of war are as distasteful to us--artistically, they are as inaccessible--as the facts of World War I were to readers whose sensibility was still Victorian. Paul Fussell has shown in “The Great War and Modern Memory” how great a shift had to take place before World War I could be accommodated artistically. A second shift followed World War II. A third may be under way now.

Recently, a Latin American writer described to me how agents of his country’s right-wing military regime, in a nighttime raid on a remote farm, amputated the arm of one member of the farm family and used it as a club to beat the other members. Government-sponsored atrocities like this are precisely the kind of bad news that makes people stop reading the newspaper. But there, precisely, is the literary point: Something more than the newspaper is called for. As we shrink from such “senseless” violence, so we shrink from a definition of war heroism in terms of the stealthy, endlessly patient resistance to it. But a great writer can make us grow to what we shrink from.

Examples of atrocity and of resistance rise on the Left and the Right alike. In Poland, a priest is tortured and mocked with cross-shaped cigarette burns. In Cuba, a young man celebrates his 30th birthday in prison for the crime of writing anti-Castro graffiti at the age of 16. No Marine landing will save such victims. Their struggles are not, may the word perish with Henry Kissinger, “geopolitical.” But theirs is the true struggle of this era, a war of eternal attrition in which foreign intrigue and crime in the streets become a single problem and a nation’s greatest victory may be the one that wins it an honest police force.

It is both a cliche and an error to say that the Vietnamese War was a civil war: an error because superpower involvement so clearly internationalized the conflict; a cliche because we have heard too often that for the Vietnamese as well as for the Americans, this war was a nightmare in which today’s smiling neighbor could be tomorrow’s mortal enemy. And yet, on both these counts, the Vietnamese War is definitive for the late 20th Century. For in a hundred national theaters, the new war, the war whose greatest writers have yet to be heard from, is a war to reclaim order and mercy both from the blundering superpowers and from the bloodthirsty underpowers: the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Brigade, the Jewish Defense League, the Irish Republican Army, the Islamic Jihad, the Khmer Rouge, the Mafia, the Contras.

The world in which a guerrilla war may be financed by a drug deal stands at a great aesthetic remove from the one in which World War II was fought. Vietnam is definitive because Vietnam was the beginning of all that. Wherefore, hesitatingly,a second condition: The American imagination will break the shackles of World War II when the 700,000 Vietnamese now among us begin to write.

The Vietnamese exiles are a group whose silence, on this anniversary, has been deafening. What oral histories, what memoirs, what poems and novels must await their pens! But to date, we have heard almost nothing from them. The war literature of Vietnam in English, not to gainsay its real merits, is a literature written by American soldiers and journalists for American civilians. The people most violently affected have so far had the least to say.

Eloquence may come slowly, but eloquence is not all. What will count for more is honesty. As Thomas More--himself the subtlest and most eloquent of resisters--once said, “Even as much folly is uttered with painted, polished speech, so many, boisterous and rude in language, see deep indeed and give right substantial counsel.” Let those lines scotch the memory of the noted anti-war liberal who told us to withdraw from Vietnam and “let that little country lapse back into the obscurity it so richly deserves.” Vietnam--larger both in area and in population than Italy-- is neither so little nor so obscure as all that. Its story, told from the inside, will someday be of great and genuine interest--for several reasons but most of all because its latest oppressor is its own government.

The Vietnamese in America have more to say about all of this than they have so far said. Of that much we can be certain. We may hope in addition that what they say will help their new country dream its way past a thousand locked doors to where the real war of the ‘80s and the ‘90s is being fought. We may know where we are already, but we have yet to imagine what we know.