COLUMN ONE : Vietnam and WWII: Myths and Memories : New ideas open some old wounds as Americans re-examine the legacies of two watershed eras. ‘When you tamper with the war stories that a culture tells itself, you’re playing with fire,’ one observer says.

Old war stories never die. They just fade away, into bulletproof memories and media myths. Like comforting legends, they reassure us of our strengths. Like ugly scars, they remind us of defeats that can’t be forgotten.

Whether they are told by a veteran to his grandchildren or beamed to millions of viewers in a television documentary, war stories can bind one generation to the next. But do they tell us the truth?

This year, America will mark two watershed dates--the 50th anniversary of World War II’s conclusion and the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. As commemorations begin, a growing number of historians, veterans and civilians are taking new looks at the social legacies of both conflicts. They are chipping away at the conventional wisdom that America had only shining moments during World War II and only bad experiences in Vietnam.

None doubt that the Allies won a clear victory over tyranny in 1945, or that the Southeast Asian war was a fiasco. Few question the bravery of American soldiers in either conflict, or the astonishing economic productivity of the U.S. home front in the 1940s, a time when Americans seemed as united by national purpose as they were divided in the 1960s.

But that is where the common ground ends.

“America loves to portray the Second World War as a great crusade, which in many respects it was, but we’ve ignored the dark underbelly of that time,” said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University history professor. “We’ve also viewed Vietnam as a dark hole from which nothing good emerged. But these are exaggerations. People are coming up with new interpretations of both eras.”

The new views range from explorations of racism, sexism and profiteering in World War II, to suggestions that the Vietnam years--for all their rancor--led to a maturing of U.S. foreign policy, a cultural revolution and a healthy skepticism about government that endures in our political life.

Collectively, these new war stories add up to a major revision of American history, and there appears to be some public support for them. But they also inspire fierce opposition. To many, these new interpretations are offensive, bordering on desecration.

“They didn’t call World War II the Good War for nothing,” said Joe Liotta, 73, who served on the aircraft carrier Intrepid in the Pacific. “I can’t think of a time when this country was in better shape. We got the job done. We worked together and came out on top.”

For Liotta and others, there is no finer moment in America’s official history. Those who would criticize the Big One do so at their own peril.

“When you tamper with the war stories that a culture tells itself, you’re playing with fire,” said James Loewen, a University of Vermont sociology professor. “That’s when history gets dangerous, when it rocks the boat.”

A-Bomb Raises Issue

America got a taste of this in January when the Smithsonian Institution was forced to revise a proposed exhibit on the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending World War II in August, 1945. Veterans groups and some politicians were furious that curators questioned the morality of using the bombs. But they seemed even angrier at portrayals of the Japanese as victims of an atrocity, replete with stomach-turning photos and testimonials.

“The original exhibition they had planned was preposterous,” said historian Stanley Karnow. “You can’t turn history upside down and tell people that a war we had to fight 50 years ago was bad. People don’t buy that.”

But is it that simple? In a recent Times national poll of adult Americans, 59% said World War II was a mixed experience for the country and 20% said it was negative. Only 15% said the war was one of the nation’s greatest moments.

Meanwhile, 72% said America is either no longer divided over Vietnam or the divisions are healing. Although 72% also called the war a negative experience, the findings suggest that the United States may be ready for a more objective look at the conflict, which ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

“These wars are different, but they’re two sides of a coin,” said Studs Terkel, who wrote “The Good War,” an oral history of World War II. “They were defining moments for fathers and sons, for two generations who got sore at each other. They never told the same war stories, and they still don’t.”

Welcome to the great divide.

For John Marshall, a Vietnam-era conscientious objector, the 1960s were a time of tension with some family members. There also were clashes with members of his own generation who fought in Vietnam. Looking back, he says protesters across America helped end a futile war.

Marshall served 21 months in the Army before he was reclassified as a conscientious objector in 1971. His grandfather, S.L.A. Marshall, a prominent military historian, was appalled and disowned him in a blistering letter:

“We know why you quit. It wasn’t conscience. You simply chickened out. You didn’t have the guts it takes. Vietnam or any point of danger was unacceptable to you. No males among us have ever been like that and the women, too, thank heaven, are stronger. That means you don’t belong.”

The two never spoke again, and the elder Marshall died in 1977. But his grandson reconciled with him years later, if only in his mind. He publicly defended his grandfather against charges of falsifying research, and although he deplored what the older man had done to him, love and family meant more.

“I’ve forgiven him, and I wish he could forgive me,” said Marshall, 48, now a journalist with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Too many homes were torn apart by this, and in its way it had a greater emotional impact than World War II. Times changed. American learned some important lessons from the Vietnam War, and I think it helped the nation grow up.”

But don’t tell that to Liotta. Like many of his generation, he fought the big war in person and watched Vietnam on television, and to him they are like night and day. America hit a military peak in 1945, he says, and it has been going downhill since.

“After WWII, this country got healthy in a hurry, because the Depression was finally over,” Liotta said. “After Vietnam, we had a bad hangover for years. I mean, nobody wants to talk about it anymore. Why should they?”

It is a familiar argument, that World War II pulled America together and Vietnam tore it apart: In the 1940s, women entered the work force in record numbers. The military eventually was desegregated. There was great economic prosperity. Boosted by the GI Bill, millions of veterans got jobs and educational benefits, plus low-interest mortgages that propelled them into the economic mainstream.

By contrast, Vietnam was a quagmire of division, a time of antagonisms that still scar us deeply, ranging from civil rights upheavals and political violence to the distortions of an overheated, military-based economy.

The Southeast Asian war, wrote historian Geoffrey Perret, “cast a shadow over American life. If anything good came out of (Vietnam) it’s hard to see what it was. Although not defeated on the battlefield, the country had failed, and that felt much like defeat measured by previous American conflicts.”

Revising Some Myths

These traditional views have dominated media images of both wars. World War II documentaries typically show Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima and victory celebrations in Times Square. Vietnam retrospectives show the last U.S. helicopter leaving Saigon, plus demonstrators clashing with police.

But some myths may be ripe for revision.

Beneath the hoopla, the 1940s home front was rocked by race riots in Detroit and the “Zoot Suit” brawls in Los Angeles, where white GIs attacked Latinos, according to Harvard history professor Ellen Fitzpatrick. America celebrated Rosie the Riveter, but women who took jobs in war plants lost them when the conflict ended, learning from ad campaigns that their proper place was now behind a vacuum cleaner.

In the panicky aftermath of Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt trumpeted the “Four Freedoms,” he did little to directly stop Adolf Hitler’s massacre of 6 million Jews, many historians say. And while we fought for democracy abroad--with an army that included thousands of African Americans--Jim Crow laws prevailed at home.

“We’ve made World War II seem glorious in a cartoonish sort of way,” said historian Michael Beschloss. “But in doing so, we avoid troubling facts. Some 50 years later, America still isn’t attuned to the realism of that time.”

“We Pulled Together and Won!” reads a popular history of the period. But what about Richmond, a white community east of San Francisco that was transformed overnight into an integrated shipyard? Racial tensions flared, and when whites fled to suburbs after the war, the city became a ghetto, according to architectural historian Margaret Crawford.

“These are the kinds of memories that have been suppressed by the culture at large,” she said. “There was a whole literature of forgotten voices that grew up during World War II, but people barely remember them today.”

An example was “If He Hollers, Let Him Go” by Chester Himes, a black novelist. The book deals with wartime discrimination in California, and Bob Jones, the main character, broods that racism has destroyed his confidence.

“They shook that in Los Angeles,” he says at the outset. “It wasn’t being refused employment in the plants so much. When I got here, practically the only job a Negro could get was service in the white folks’ kitchens. It was the look on the people’s faces when you asked them about a job. . . . All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes.”

Those feelings are echoed by James Graham, whose combat service with other black men aboard the Mason was noted last year by the Navy--50 years after the fact. President Clinton, in a ceremony, said that “for decades African Americans were missing in our memories of World War II.”

It is no accident, says Graham, a Long Island man who lectures on the subject. “How do you think it feels, when you watch documentaries about World War II and almost never see a black face?” he asks. “I have to believe that racism was a big part of this, that we were just second-class citizens.”

Although her skin is white, Alice Niestockel has similar feelings.

She was part of a Red Cross nursing brigade that followed American soldiers into Normandy a few days after D-day. She survived like the GIs, freezing in the winter, living off C rations and using helmets as latrines. Niestockel lost friends in the Battle of the Bulge and was in the first U.S. contingent to visit the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

“It’s something I’ll always remember,” the Florida woman said, describing corpses stacked in piles. “But sometimes I think the work of nurses like me has been passed over in war remembrances. We were part of it, too, you know.”

Nobody who experienced the Big One can forget it. No one wants to be forgotten. These days, Liotta is a guide at the USS Intrepid Museum in Manhattan, sitting at a desk in the hull of his old ship. Asked about the war, he rummages through a shopping bag and fishes out photos of his crew.

“These guys were fighters,” Liotta says, recalling a reconnaissance flight that landed on the Intrepid, then skidded into the sea. He and two others survived, but the pilot drowned.

“We were good guys fighting bad guys,” he adds. “Nothing like Vietnam.”

Grass-Roots Dissent

Few would have disagreed 20 years ago, when Saigon fell. But the passage of time and new perspectives can make even the worst eras look better.

On the flip side of conventional history, the Southeast Asian war showed that grass-roots dissent could change foreign policy. Although House Speaker Newt Gingrich and others attack the 1960s as the root of what ails us, the decade sparked an abiding distrust of government that now flowers on the right, according to Ronald Steel, a USC professor of international relations.

“The most valuable lesson from the Vietnam War is that we lost it,” Steel said. “Without that experience of limits, we might have fought a similar war in the 1980s, perhaps in Central America, and with the exact same result.”

Loud and contentious, the Vietnam years were like an extended bout of psychoanalysis: Troubling national problems came to light, and confronting them was often unsettling. But ignoring them would have been worse.

To be sure, others draw different conclusions from America’s longest war. In January, Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) reopened a national wound when he stood up on the floor of Congress and accused Clinton of giving aid and comfort to the enemy as a Vietnam protester.

Although his colleagues severely reprimanded him, Dornan reaped a whirlwind of publicity. Talk radio sizzled; it seemed that Americans were once again at odds over Southeast Asia.

“Personally, I think he (Dornan) is a lunatic,” said Mark Leepson, arts editor for Veteran, the magazine published by Vietnam Veterans of America. “But I know there are people in our organization who agree with him. Lots of people still have divergent views of that time. Their memories don’t change.”

‘Unlike Father’s War’

In some ways, it was like any other war. Full of blood and fear:

“Now and then there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn’t, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. . . It was the burden of being alive.”

Like millions of Americans who served in Vietnam, Tim O’Brien learned that combat was harsh and unforgiving. But he also discovered that the Mekong Delta was light-years from Omaha Beach. His award-winning book about the war, “The Things They Carried,” makes that difference clear.

“I’m a child of World War II culture, and I grew up playing war games on golf courses,” he said. “Then, when I got to Vietnam, I got caught up in something utterly unlike my father’s war. It was an aimless kind of terror.”

There were no tropical islands to conquer, no Parisian boulevards to liberate, O’Brien explains. Just endless jungle patrols and an enemy waiting to pounce. Unlike World War II, there seemed no political point to it.

For John Davidson, 48, Vietnam was a stark voyage into himself that he has difficulty sharing with strangers. Once you experienced combat and the imminence of death, he says, you were never the same.

“I went to sleep not knowing if I’d wake up alive. I put myself on the line, and I expected some respect from my own country,” said Davidson, who recently revisited Vietnam. “But the Vietnamese gave me more respect this time than I ever got back home.”

Will the wound heal? Davidson, an assistant managing editor at the Dallas Morning News, speaks more from sadness than anger.

“They could give us all the parades in the world and it wouldn’t matter,” he said. “We need private healing, not public acts. For lots of people, Vietnam is just a blip on the American timeline. We can’t forget it.”

Anniversaries Contrast

As the nation gears up to honor its twin war anniversaries, the contrasts are telling. There will be a flood of World War II-related activities, with ceremonies in local communities, Washington, D.C., Europe and the Pacific.

The Vietnam anniversary, however, will be muted. There are conferences planned at UC Davis and other sites, plus low-key events across the nation. It would be different if Hanoi had surrendered to U.S. troops in 1975, suggests Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

“We don’t have a comparable level of interest for the fall of Saigon as for the end of World War II, and with good reason,” he said. “What do you really celebrate with Vietnam? Both wars taught us very different lessons.”

Indeed, most Americans believe the lesson of World War II is that tyranny must be met with force. But the Vietnam legacy is ambiguous. Some believe it has made us wary of reckless military adventures. Others say it has paralyzed America’s foreign policy.

Can the experiences of these two wars be reconciled? That, according to many observers, is the dilemma facing historians as well as the generations molded by each conflict. Until a World War II veteran like Bob Dole and a Vietnam dissenter like Bill Clinton can shake hands and speak the same language, the wrangling over our past will continue.

“How you tell war stories is crucial to a country’s self-image,” said historian Tom Engelhardt. “And America’s problem is that, since the end of World War II, we really haven’t had one fundamental story that unites us.”

Perhaps only the passage of time will heal the breach. It took more than 100 years for the United States to forge any consensus on the Civil War, and the nation could be years away from coming to grips with its recent history. The best hope, suggests O’Brien, is for future generations to face these issues openly, free from their parent’s emotional and psychological baggage.

“Real war stories aren’t about war,” he said. “They’re about compassion and suffering. This is what people ultimately learn from war. You show them reality, you show them the horror and let them draw their own conclusions.”

Just ask Sandi Krantz, whose brother was killed in Vietnam. This month, her hometown of Frederick, Md., will be honoring him and 22 other men who never came home. She hopes that the quiet ceremony will give her some closure.

“I want to think we learned some powerful lessons from Vietnam, and that it wasn’t just a terrible loss and waste,” she said. “You don’t send boys to fight in a war that breaks down at home. This country can’t forget that.”

Once, Krantz wrestled with personal demons, wondering if her brother died in vain. She needed something positive to hold onto, and now she has found it.

“There’s no more shame,” Krantz says firmly. “My brother and others like him were sacrificial lambs. But I think future generations will thank them.”

Genesis Pondered

As they gather in a semicircle, 10 teen-agers ponder the lessons of war and peace. Did President Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen so America would be pushed into war? Would we have dropped the atomic bomb on Germany?

It’s a busy Wednesday at Eastern High School in Voorhees, N.J., and an Advanced Placement class in American history has 45 minutes to get through World War II. A few weeks later, they will spend a day or so on Vietnam and the 1960s before the semester ends.

“You can’t believe how compressed this all becomes,” said Louis Fuller, the instructor. “But these kids have a lot to say and they speak freely.”

More freely, perhaps, than Smithsonian curators could speak on the atom bomb. For these students, there are no emotional links to the past.

“We dropped the bomb to show the Russians we had it,” says Glenda Wrenn.

But what about Japan, asks Chris Ward? We had a war to win.

“Money was a concern,” says Abhishek Gangulee. “Why do we always make so much money during wars, and then other countries are so messed up?”

Fuller shifts the topic to Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor, asking: “To what degree did he know about the impending attack? Should we blame this man?”

The question arose in their textbook, and Dan Sorid is not impressed. “It’s preposterous to say FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance,” he says. “That would be really inhuman, to let this kind of thing just happen. I think it might show some bias in the textbook.”

When the class ends, Fuller’s students have covered 1939-1945. Next stop: The Cold War. Why did the Japanese and Germans become our friends so quickly?

“I wish we had more time,” the teacher says. “At least we get them talking. They get the big picture, then it’s up to them to figure out.”

You’re never too old--or too young--to learn about war. Americans might quarrel over their recent history, but the ultimate lesson remains the same.

In “The Wall,” a children’s book by Eve Bunting, a boy visits Washington to see his grandfather’s name on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. His father’s voice blurs as he lifts him up to touch the letters etched in black marble.

“It’s a place of honor,” the father explains. “I’m proud that your grandfather’s name is on this wall.”

“I am too,” the boy answers. “But I’d rather have my grandpa here, telling me to button my jacket because it’s cold. I’d rather have him here.”