Oct 10, 2004
Murray Polner: Review of Philip D. Beidler's Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam (Georgia,2004)
Like many discharged Vietnam War veterans of sustained combat,
Philip Beidler felt numb, drank like a fish, divorced, and wound up in the arms of women whose names he probably can’t remember.
I don’t imagine books by and about Vietnam are widely read and discussed anymore. Nor can they be found on best-seller lists even today, when we are engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Beidler’s recollections are different. What his book offers, some 35 years later, is a mirror image of the bitter and irreconcilable antiwar books composed by disillusioned and resentful ex-soldiers between the two world wars of the 20th century. Philip Beidler was and may still be an angry veteran. God knows he has every right to his anger.
Still, it’s more than a familiar retelling of the war’s outrages and crimes. Beautifully written, at times eloquent, Beidler, an ROTC lieutenant and armored cavalry platoon leader, has written this gem of a book perhaps, as he says, “to keep us from going insane with anger about efforts by people such as McNamara to say he’s sorry now. Or as we might have said it down in III Corps, ‘Sorry, Mr. McNamara, but dead is dead, and sorry don’t mean shit.’”
His contempt is reserved as well for the foreign policy elites, like Rostow, Rusk, and Bundy, who either cheered on the war or just couldn’t say no to LBJ. He mentions the two Tonkin Bay “attacks”—one a U.S.- South Vietnamese provocation, the second a lie to justify American military intervention which led to 58,000 GI deaths, hundreds of thousands wounded in body and mind, and three million Southeast Asians dead. He writes about battles between black and white soldiers away from combat areas. As an officer, albeit a junior one, he felt so threatened by fraggings or the killing of officers and NCOs that he began carrying a weapon in non-combat areas. He spends a chapter on the murderers of My Lai, one platoon of which “had already become known as accomplished rapists.” Its officers, except Lt. William Calley, were never punished, though Calley was cheered on by home front rightwing patriots and excused by Richard Nixon.
All the same, Beidler goes beyond these atrocious events, which in any event are barely remembered now by bewildered Americans who find it hard to believe that virtually all our many wars may not have been inherently just. He visits the Wall and spots the names of too many men from his unit. There are no names on the Wall for America’s other recent wars: Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Were they merely cannon fodder for our new breed of chicken hawks in Washington or genuine patriots? 0r just ordinary men and women seeking adventure or cash? Now, he literally sneers, with the war in Iraq ongoing and no end in sight, yellow ribbons and flags are everywhere to be seen along with “Proud to be an American bullshit.”
Since his return home he’s remarried, adores his daughter, and teaches English at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. He remembers and honors the ordinary soldiers with whom he served. But he also honors a conscientious objector, John Balaban, now a close friend and “role model,” who chose to do his alternative service in Vietnam. In Beidler’s judgment, his recollection, “Remembering Heaven’s Face,” belongs on the same shelf as the finest memoirists of Vietnam, books by veterans W.D. Ehrhart, Ron Kovic, Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo and others. To Beidler, Balaban, now poet-in-residence at North Carolina State University, is a "moral witness in Vietnam,” the subtitle Balaban gave to “Remembering Heaven’s Face.”
So, with Iraq still burning, can Syria or Iran or North Korea and a revived draft be far behind? “Meanwhile, we can be getting the hoo-ah kids ready for the next American shoot-em-up,” he concludes. “ Go out and do the mission, we’ll say. Deal with the Charlies or the sammies or the ragheads or whatever. From where I stand, after all these years, I can offer only one sure lesson: Don’t come home expecting anyone to care.”
I don’t imagine books by and about Vietnam are widely read and discussed anymore. Nor can they be found on best-seller lists even today, when we are engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Beidler’s recollections are different. What his book offers, some 35 years later, is a mirror image of the bitter and irreconcilable antiwar books composed by disillusioned and resentful ex-soldiers between the two world wars of the 20th century. Philip Beidler was and may still be an angry veteran. God knows he has every right to his anger.
Still, it’s more than a familiar retelling of the war’s outrages and crimes. Beautifully written, at times eloquent, Beidler, an ROTC lieutenant and armored cavalry platoon leader, has written this gem of a book perhaps, as he says, “to keep us from going insane with anger about efforts by people such as McNamara to say he’s sorry now. Or as we might have said it down in III Corps, ‘Sorry, Mr. McNamara, but dead is dead, and sorry don’t mean shit.’”
His contempt is reserved as well for the foreign policy elites, like Rostow, Rusk, and Bundy, who either cheered on the war or just couldn’t say no to LBJ. He mentions the two Tonkin Bay “attacks”—one a U.S.- South Vietnamese provocation, the second a lie to justify American military intervention which led to 58,000 GI deaths, hundreds of thousands wounded in body and mind, and three million Southeast Asians dead. He writes about battles between black and white soldiers away from combat areas. As an officer, albeit a junior one, he felt so threatened by fraggings or the killing of officers and NCOs that he began carrying a weapon in non-combat areas. He spends a chapter on the murderers of My Lai, one platoon of which “had already become known as accomplished rapists.” Its officers, except Lt. William Calley, were never punished, though Calley was cheered on by home front rightwing patriots and excused by Richard Nixon.
All the same, Beidler goes beyond these atrocious events, which in any event are barely remembered now by bewildered Americans who find it hard to believe that virtually all our many wars may not have been inherently just. He visits the Wall and spots the names of too many men from his unit. There are no names on the Wall for America’s other recent wars: Panama, Grenada, Haiti, Kuwait, Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Were they merely cannon fodder for our new breed of chicken hawks in Washington or genuine patriots? 0r just ordinary men and women seeking adventure or cash? Now, he literally sneers, with the war in Iraq ongoing and no end in sight, yellow ribbons and flags are everywhere to be seen along with “Proud to be an American bullshit.”
Since his return home he’s remarried, adores his daughter, and teaches English at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. He remembers and honors the ordinary soldiers with whom he served. But he also honors a conscientious objector, John Balaban, now a close friend and “role model,” who chose to do his alternative service in Vietnam. In Beidler’s judgment, his recollection, “Remembering Heaven’s Face,” belongs on the same shelf as the finest memoirists of Vietnam, books by veterans W.D. Ehrhart, Ron Kovic, Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo and others. To Beidler, Balaban, now poet-in-residence at North Carolina State University, is a "moral witness in Vietnam,” the subtitle Balaban gave to “Remembering Heaven’s Face.”
So, with Iraq still burning, can Syria or Iran or North Korea and a revived draft be far behind? “Meanwhile, we can be getting the hoo-ah kids ready for the next American shoot-em-up,” he concludes. “ Go out and do the mission, we’ll say. Deal with the Charlies or the sammies or the ragheads or whatever. From where I stand, after all these years, I can offer only one sure lesson: Don’t come home expecting anyone to care.”