Ideology is not Enough

"IT WAS HARD enough to accept our son's death," says a letter President Nixon recently cited to demonstrate the humanity of his war on Indochina. "But to know it was all in vain would have been even more a tragedy."

A similar feeling may be surfacing on the Left. A recent article argued in The Crimson, for example, that the essential lesson of Vietnam is the usefulness of properly applied revolutionary violence. "Now that armed struggle seems to be drawing to a close," it says, "the Vietnamese do not survey the damage in their half-destroyed country with unease. They surely mourn their dead and tend to their wounded, but all along they knew the high cost of a revolution and were willing to pay the price."

This sort of vicarious heroism repels me. What kind of person would feel no unease as he remembered his village burning to the ground? How many Vietnamese mothers felt no qualms when American bombers killed their sons? If all Vietnamese combined the best qualities of Edith Cavell, Abraham Lincoln and Ho Chi Minh, maybe their revolution would be successful enough to outweigh the individual tragedies of 1.6 million dead, at least for people--if there are any--personally untouched by the war. But however appalling they found the prospect of indefinite misrule by the United States and its Vietnamese collaborators, it seems unlikely that the Vietnamese consciously chose a fifteen-year struggle for a juster society with full knowledge that their tremulous victory would be realized in an Indochina unrecognizable and half-destroyed. Though the Vietnamese might like to let a hundred flowers bloom we have defoliated the forests; and it is difficult to build anything with mutilated hands.

I DON'T QUESTION Vietnamese heroism, which, like all heroism, will live forever. But too many of the heroes are dead for us to rejoice in them. Once more the embattled farmers' shot is heard around the world, but those who lie fertilizing their own farms will never hear the echoes.

The February 4 New York Times Magazine printed selections from diaries found on dead Vietnamese. "I wish one day that I could see my family again," wrote Bui Quang Vinh, from a village north of Hanoi. "...If anyone, any comrade, any friend, happens to read this note, please have understanding for me. I have been so long in this war..."

"Tomorrow I will offer my youth to the revolution," wrote Luong Trong Tan of the 320th North Vietnamese Division shortly before he was killed. "Tomorrow our country will be unified and I will enjoy a peaceful spring...How I detest war."

"It is already summer at home, the sweet jasmine must be in bloom again," began a letter, never posted, from Nguyen Van Minh, a schoolteacher, worried that his girl friend might be seeing another man. "Do you tell him you love him the way you told me, lying there under the trees by the river, do you remember, Hoa? Your long hair brushed my face, my golden summer butterfly. Maybe you should get married. The enemy is very barbarous...This terrible war makes so many strange thoughts race through my head. I would like to jump straight up for thousands of miles to get away from here, from this killing...But it is the duty of a soldier to die for his country...There is no choice."

The Vietnamese did not choose greatness--who but a lunatic would?--they had greatness thrust upon them. Most of them would probably have preferred peace under General Thieu to the endless terror of civil war and American repression.

Our admiration for people who could fire hopelessly and calmly at phalanxes of B52's is not therefore less. Quite the reverse, since superhuman heroism has as little meaning to ordinary people like us as the subhumanity to which Nixon would reduce his victims. But our shame is greater. For we allowed the bureaucrats to send those phalanxes in our name.

LATELY WE HAVE spent a lot of time discussing amnesty. President Nixon, with his usual comprehensive knowledge and compassion, tells us that the word means forgiveness. Everyone makes mistakes, he concedes--he has made mistakes himself--but mistakes must be paid for. With unwonted generosity, Nixon even acknowledges the asylum most governments have offered American refugees. Like the good Christian in Pride and Prejudice, the President is willing to forgive those he considers trangressors as long as they are never again admitted to his sight and never again mentioned in his hearing.

Actually, of course, amnesty means forgetting, and Nixon is right to reject this. That there was a saving remnant who would not fight for General Thieu is one of the few aspects of the Indochina war that we can be proud of. If we had any sense, we should shout it from the mountaintops.

But there is another question: should we grant ourselves amnesty? Clearly we ought not to spend all our time musing on those Nixon, Johnson and the rest have murdered in our name. Although Nixon is wrong, as usual, in saying that it takes two to heal a wound--wounds heal by themselves or not at all--we probably shouldn't irritate those that won't require amputation. It is right and proper, for example, that we should welcome our returning prisoners, for they too have suffered, whatever suffering they inflicted.

BUT THE REAL danger is that we will forget altogether. We're making herculean efforts to do so already, even as Nixon steps up the bombing of Cambodia and the Senate hears of 200,000 Vietnamese made refugees since the cease-fire. And some of those who seemed to recognize the atrocity of the war now seem, perhaps most understandably, eager to forget it. Already we have watched Nixon spokesmen defending aid to North Vietnam from the onslaughts of Senator McGovern.

So I think we need to remember and to be honest. We have to recognize our complicity in war crimes, or it may happen again. We need to recapture our own revolutionary tradition, and to recognize that other liberation movements, including the NLF, are ours as well. But we can't do this by hero-worship: every revolution, as Shaw occasionally pointed out and as the NLF has occasionally proved by its executions of province chiefs and the like, attracts those for whom established injustice is too exacting as well as those for whom it is not exacting enough. Neither can we trust in revolutionary insensitivity. Suffering is real even if it comes in a progressive cause. Nixon's correspondent is deceived. Her son would be no less dead if his death had a meaning. Neither fervor nor ideology can restore life.