Neck deep in the Big Muddy…
We’d been gone from the last battlefield, but ultimately Vietnam was our war.
Fifty years ago we knew the war was lost.
The tanks rolled in.
The last helicopter flew out to sea.
Saigon became Ho Chi Mihn City.
We’d been gone from the last battlefield, but ultimately it was our war.
And we lost.
Lost the war.
Lost our innocence.
As a country, as a generation.
It was a different America before the war.
Learning “Duck and cover” in my grade school classroom. Checking out a model backyard fallout shelter at the state fair. Hearing “Ask not…” from the black and white TV with my third-grade class.
There was no question about it. Americans were the world’s good guys. We’d won the Good War and now stood firm against the International Communist Conspiracy. Americans were the bulwark against the worldwide advance of Godless Communism and its deluded fellow travelers. Better dead, we were told, than Red.
Vietnam would put that slogan to the test.
We went there first as “advisors” – certain and confident that a few well-fed white men would quickly show the backward natives how it was done.
It didn’t work out that way. Either the Viet Cong were just slow learners and didn’t catch on that they’d best skedaddle and stay skedaddled when they saw a Green Beret a’comin’ or they were a bit more stubborn, clever, and determined than the wise men in Washington were willing to give them credit for.
“We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool sys to push on…”*
I was a child then. Neighbors, friends went off to war. Some came back damaged. Some came back whole. Some didn’t come back at all.
Five-thirty, every night, the war was beamed into our homes. First in black and white, then in living color. Every week Time, Newsweek, U.S. News published a magazine section devoted to the carnage a world away. Life and Look showed pictures of death we’d have rather not seen.
“…and the big fool says to push on…”
One by one by one some Americans first questioned, then doubted, then stood up to say no…no more. Enough, already.
Some, but not all.
“My country, right or wrong…love it or leave it,” came the reply.
Wounds opened that, half a century and more later, have barely begun to heal.
Each of us has our own war story, a story we tell with caution, still aware how it puts us forever on one side or another of a divide that, for so many, still cannot be bridged.
I can’t but wonder how that divide is echoed in the divisions we’re experiencing today. Vietnam divided America by economic class, by level of education, by rural and urban. It sowed a distrust of government, of institutions, and of the people who represent and speak for them. Our “One nation, indivisible…” was forever divided.
Fifty years ago the tanks rolled into Saigon.
That war was over.
Fifty years later we’re still “neck deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool says to push on…”
No. No more. Enough, already.