Vietnam’s Shadows in Persian Gulf

There are few things as dangerous as a popular war.

Like an occupying army, the majority’s opinion usually brooks little opposition and leans toward harsh measures when its authority is challenged.

So far, however, the Gulf War has been an exception. Though it continues, according the polls, to be supported by eight out of 10 Americans, a similarly overwhelming majority insists that the right to voice anti-war sentiments must be protected. Yet even fewer people than one might expect are speaking out.

In part, this restraint may reflect a lingering unease about the Gulf War’s immediate impact and its implications for the future. In that sense, uncertainty is the mother of civility. It may also be, though, that support for the war is not as unequivocal nor dissent quite as quiescent as surveys of public opinion seem to report.

This week, for example, I spoke with three people the pollsters would call “opinion leaders”--Rep. Anthony Beilenson, a Democrat and senior member of California’s congressional delegation, writer and journalist John Gregory Dunne and businessman Steve Markoff, founder of A-Mark Precious Metals Inc., a Los Angeles firm whose sales last year exceeded $1 billion.

All three oppose the use of military force in the Persian Gulf at this time. And all are generally agreed on why their view remains that of a distinct minority.

Like their generals and politicians, the American people learned from the trauma of Vietnam. One of the lessons with which we still are struggling to come to terms is our lingering sense of bad conscience over the way in which men and women who served in Southeast Asia were treated.

Many of us who opposed the war now believe that the peace movement made a fundamental mistake when it failed to distinguish sufficiently between the government’s policy and those who were sent under orders to execute it. Many of those who approved the war also feel that, once the war was over, America all but abandoned the men and women who had fought it. According to a poll released this week, only a quarter of Americans consider Vietnam to have been a “just war.”

It is no accident that the Vietnam War Memorial is the most visited of all federal monuments. And its shadow extends all the way to the Persian Gulf.

“The last time I went to Washington, I visited the Vietnam memorial and I had tears in my eyes,” Markoff says. “The people who were killed and wounded in Vietnam were treated like lepers.

“I think people are afraid to say they’re against the Gulf War because they’re afraid that will be translated into ‘We’re not supporting our troops.’ I think that if there were no American troops in the Persian Gulf, and we were using all drone planes and no American lives were at stake, the same people would say, ‘What the hell are we doing there?’ I think Americans are very concerned about supporting the people in the Gulf and not doing to our vets today what was done to the Vietnam vets.

“I think there are lot of people who want to feel America is strong, who want to back the the President and our people in the Gulf. . . . There’s a lot of ambivalence on both sides. I have found that people have views, but so far they’re visceral rather than analytical. There’s not much passion on either side.

“The only thing I think there is true unity on is to back the people on the front lines, with which I happen to agree.”

Beilenson, who says he remains “proud” of his vote against the use of force in the Gulf, agrees that such memories “temper one’s expressions about the war. . . . It’s not so much the pressure one feels from other people, as it is simply being an American and wanting us to do well and, most especially, of not wanting to see American men and women who have been sent to the Gulf hurt or killed.”

This sentiment, Beilenson argues, is supported by another, less selfless attitude. “Along with everything else we’ve done over the past 10 years or so, there seems to be no cost to us. We’re not being asked to pay for this war by raising our taxes. We’re not being asked to accept a draft. We’re not being asked to pay an energy tax. Most of us are not being asked to suffer any inconvenience. You see it all from a great distance on television and it seems to be cost-free, which makes it easy to support.”

It is this fact that most animates Dunne’s reaction to the war, which is unsurprising in a writer whose finest work turns on that point of discrepancy between what people believe and what they do.

“It seems to me to be patriotism on the cheap, war without cost.” Dunne says. “I had a friend who is one of American journalism’s elite. He is a ‘reluctant’ jingo--one who thinks it’s a dirty job, but that someone has to do it. On the war’s eve, I asked him, ‘Does that someone include your son?’ And he said to me without even pausing for breath, ‘Are you crazy?’

“There you have it: This is a war that is crazy for the sons and daughters of the entitled, but not so crazy for the sons and daughters of the unentitled.

“Besides this question of class, there is an element here of ‘Get the wog.’ I think that race covers every single facet of American political life and to claim it’s not a factor in this war with Iraq is to stick your head in the sand.”

Perhaps--and particularly after this week’s tragic civilian deaths in Baghdad--that is the lesson America will be called upon to take from this war.

For all its dark eloquence, the Vietnam Memorial recites only America’s part of the Southeast Asian tragedy. Perhaps when we inscribe the memory of this war in stone, a place will be found not only for those Kuwaitis who were Saddam Hussein’s innocent victims, but also for the names of those thousands of Iraqi innocents whose deaths otherwise will be recalled only as “collateral damage.”