And a merciful God did not come: a reflection on John Kerry’s Viet Nam quagmire

August Carbonella

Abstract: The ‘Viet Nam War’ entered the 2004 US presidential election in a most uncanny fashion, sparking a surrogate discussion of the limits of pres- ent imperial ambition and doctrine. This essay explores the limitations and possibilities of this proxy discussion to facilitate an understanding of John Kerry’s political unraveling, as well as the continuing political dilemmas fac- ing the US left. Keywords: electoral politics, imperialism, militarism, politics of history, United States, Viet Nam, war

“We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as eas- ily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determi- nation to undertake one last mission – to search out and destroy the last vestige of this bar- baric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this coun- try these last ten years and more, so when thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and some small boys ask why, we will be able to say, “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean in- stead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped in the turn- ing” (John Kerry, 1971 testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee).

John Kerry’s acceptance speech at the 2004 dier, after all, is absolutely central to nation- Democratic National Convention in Boston alist narratives and mythologies. But Kerry’s was as much about myth making, in the gestures held a wider significance that was Barthesian sense, as it was about speech lost on no one. By evoking his past as a making. By declaring immediately that he highly decorated soldier in Viet Nam, Kerry was “reporting for duty” as he presented the symbolically reclaimed the mantle of patri- convention and wider viewing audiences otic militarist from George W. Bush, the mil- with a military salute, Kerry, as the old sol- itary ‘deserter’.1 A series of campaign ads dier, signified the homologous unity of depicting images of Kerry, gun in hand, Americanism and militarism. This signifi- walking through the jungles of Viet Nam cance, in and of itself, was not particularly anticipated this moment of mythic militarism. noteworthy. The figure of the patriotic sol- It is clear that the Kerry campaign hoped that

Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 44 (2004): 163–168 164 | August Carbonella the accumulated weight of these historic im- the wide dissemination of competing images ages and symbolic gestures, in stark contrast of the Viet Nam War was nothing less than to Bush’s preferential treatment and MIA the ability of either party to fix the meaning (missing in action) status during that war, of this bloody and sorrowful past in a way would finally leave no doubt as to which can- that discredited their opponent’s claim to didate was most deserving and fit to be com- power. Yet against the attempted closure of mander-and-chief of the US imperial military. history at the highest levels of government, a In rebuttal, Republican Party operatives new optic of the ‘Viet Nam’ years was erupt- began circulating images of another John ing in popular culture. “Like specters wait- Kerry: the anti-war activist. Televised ads ing to avenge themselves if the present fails paid for by a group called the Swift Boat Vet- to remember them” (Harootunian 2000: 18), erans for Truth saturated the airwaves, ques- the fragmented images and historical traces tioning the merits of Kerry’s war-related emerging in popular culture unsettlingly, medals and his support of US ‘troops’ in Viet even if hesitantly, brought the massive sol- Nam and, by extension, Iraq and Afghan- dier and civilian opposition to the Viet Nam istan. These ‘swift boat veterans’ proclaimed War, exemplified by Kerry’s 1971 Senate tes- they were still enraged by Kerry’s eloquent timony, into historical focus. This conver- and moving 1971 Senate testimony, in which gence of alternative interpretations of the he spoke about atrocities committed by US Viet Nam War on the 2004 political stage pro- forces against a predominantly civilian popu- vided an exceptional opportunity for a much lation in Viet Nam. Translating Kerry’s public needed public debate on present US imperial testimony and criticism of the officially sanc- ambition and doctrine. The choice Kerry was tioned genocidal conduct of the war as a per- presented with here, as I see it, centered on sonalized attack on lowly ground forces, these either reclaiming or repressing his own past swift boat vets claimed to represent a pur- of anti-war leadership, in which he forcefully ported widespread disgust that US military articulated a vision of a non-imperial future veterans held for Kerry’s hypocrisy. Although for the US – a choice, ultimately, between the multiple ties between the supposedly in- ‘dreaming forwards’ (Bloch 1996) or merely dependent swift boat veterans and the Bush ‘dreaming of the status quo’ (Harootunian administration were exposed by the inves- 2000), respectively. By choosing to define the tigative journalist Joe Conason of salon.com, past in a way that makes the present course among others, the desired political damage of military imperialism appear inevitable, was done. Together with an earlier, widely Kerry utterly lost the moral clarity that in- distributed set of images of Kerry as a young fused his entry onto the political stage thirty- anti-war activist, the swift boat ads tapped three years ago, and hence failed to generate into the reigning myth-narrative of the ‘Viet the kind of enthusiasm that earlier greeted Nam War’ in the US. This narrative centers Howard Dean’s anti-war candidacy. on veteran victimization caused by the hostil- In this most uncanny fashion, the Viet ity of anti-war activists, as well as the indif- Nam War entered the present as a surrogate ference of the wider civilian population (cf. discussion of the tensions of empire. A brief Carbonella 2003). By placing Kerry on the exploration of the contradictions of this ‘wrong’ side of this constructed soldier/civil- proxy debate, then, may help us understand ian divide, the swift boat ads called into ques- both Kerry’s political unraveling and the tion Kerry’s fitness to lead the US military in continuing dilemma facing the US left if it its expanding ‘war on terror’. continues to support the Democratic Party’s Clearly, the symbolism generated by ‘Republican-lite’ political agenda. Kerry’s presidential campaign and the Re- Since 9/11, images of the US imperial mis- publican counter-response linked the issue adventure in Viet Nam have permeated pop- of national leadership to a narrowly focused ular culture, and their prominence has only politics of historical definition. At stake in grown during the current campaign. Indeed, John Kerry’s Viet Nam quagmire | 165 a visitor from Saturn may be forgiven some and blind faith at the highest levels of the confusion over whether the US is currently Johnson and Nixon administrations – has invading Iraq or Viet Nam. In film, Viet Nam been released as a mass-market paperback War documentaries abound: Errol Morris’s by Penguin Press. (2004) The fog of war was a brilliant success; Manifestly, ‘Viet Nam’ continues to frame Peter Davis’s 1972 Academy Award–winning questions and conversation about the limits documentary Hearts and minds was recently to imperial ambition and military power. rereleased on DVD, and was showing in This is not uniformly true, of course. Recent New York City as I began writing (two days studies by Lesley Gill (2004), David Harvey before the election); and Gillo Pontecorvo’s (2003), Chalmers Johnson (2004), Rashid docudrama The battle of Algiers, which was Khalidi (2004), Catherine Lutz (2001) and considered almost obligatory viewing before Neil Smith (2003), among others, attest to the anti-war protests in the 1960s, has been re- rising scholarly interest in the US’s contem- leased on DVD in only the last two weeks. In porary imperial aspirations. Within popular addition to the documentaries, the recent culture, though, reference to Viet Nam pro- filmic remake of The quiet American, Graham vides a readily understood opportunity to Greene’s classic novelistic excoriation of US call into question the soundness and legiti- imperial ambition and machination in Viet macy of neo-conservative foreign policy ob- Nam, received an Academy Award nomina- jectives, as well as providing some space for tion. In music, a similar situation obtains. the emergence of oppositional perspectives. Billy Bang’s (2002) CD Vietnam: the aftermath, Yet there are limits as to how far this proxy one of the most well-received jazz albums of conversation about US imperialism and mili- the last two years, performed by a band of tarism can proceed. The reigning discourse in Viet Nam War veterans, opens with a tribute the US of the ‘Viet Nam experience’ renders to Ho Chi Minh; while Old Crow Medicine obscure both the history of the Viet Nam War Show’s (2004) ‘Big time in the jungle’, a and the massive protests against it. A brief newly minted Viet Nam era protest song, re- summary of this discourse will serve to illu- ceives heavy rotation on alternative and minate John Kerry’s seemingly inexplicable Americana radio stations. And American silence about his own activist past in the face dreams, a new weekly television series, rein- of the exploding public conversation about vents the Viet Nam War for a new generation the Viet Nam War. To begin with, the Viet of viewers. All of this, of course, is in addi- Nam experience refers primarily to events tion to the documentaries, books and ads on and contentions that took place within the Viet Nam War related topics produced by territorial boundaries of the United States. As both the Democratic and Republican cam- this story has unfolded over the last twenty- paigns and those close to them. five to thirty years, Viet Nam itself and the US At the same time, stories of US atrocities invasion function only as backdrops to the in Viet Nam have continued to make news. deepening fissures of the (US) nation during The Toledo Blade, a daily newspaper in Toledo the 1960s. The figure of the victimized vet- (Ohio), ran a series of investigative reports in eran – spat upon and vilified as a ‘baby killer’ October 2003 on the cover-up of a 1967 se- by virulent anti-war protesters, and treated quence of atrocities by US forces throughout with indifference by the larger civilian popu- Quang Ngai province, in South Viet Nam’s lace – stands at the heart of this dominant Central Highlands. Seymour Hersh, who memory of Viet Nam (the nation itself is re- broke the original Mai Lai story, summarized duced in language to an event in US history). and expanded upon the original Blade series Much ink, filmic representation and public in the pages of The New Yorker (2003: 41–4). memorializing have ensured that this lesson Additionally, Daniel Ellsberg’s 2002 book, Se- of Viet Nam is not forgotten. The Republican crets: a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Pa- strategists were clearly mindful of this rela- pers – an insiders’ account of imperial hubris tively systematic set of words, expressions, 166 | August Carbonella images and narratives, which now consti- upon the memory of the actual Viet Nam War tutes the ‘official story’ of the Viet Nam War, as it exploded through the fog of the official when they aired the images of Kerry as a story to make a convincing moral argument young anti-war protester. This framing of the about the invasion of Iraq. In a more perfect Viet Nam War in terms of the veterans’ world, the Republicans’ calculated gamble in trauma on their return home has sharply lim- airing images of the younger war protester ited what is publicly speakable about US im- would have provided the Kerry campaign perialism and militarism. To oppose a war in with a timely opportunity to state unequivo- the contemporary United States is to invite cally that the war in Iraq is fully as wrong as charges of betraying the troops. the earlier misadventure in Viet Nam, and that John Kerry, ever mindful of the conse- the US must embark on a course of unam- quences of appearing disloyal to the troops, biguous withdrawal. Who better to make this obviously felt he must now disown his own claim than John Kerry? He held center stage in past of anti-war leadership. In this, he was US politics at the moment. And he has, as completely in accord with the desires of the well, the requisite credentials of an old soldier Democratic Party leadership to present a turned peace activist to deflate at least some of united militarist face to the American elec- the masculinist fantasies of war that now per- torate, and thus appear as tough on ‘terrorism’ meate the public sphere, not to mention the as the Bush administration. By all appear- persistent idea of betraying the troops. As im- ances, Bush’s bellicose, post-9/11 statement portantly, by arguing that the civilian and mil- that the world is “either with us or against itary deaths in Iraq cannot be either morally or us”, seems to have resonated most strongly politically justified, Kerry could have tapped among the Democratic leadership. Kerry-the- into the lingering distaste among a large seg- candidate never failed to distance himself ment of the American people for imperial and from Kerry-the-activist for fear of being military adventurism since the Viet Nam War, painted as one who is ‘against us’. That being as evidenced by the rising din in the public the case, the political strategists of the ‘third sphere over the lessons of Viet Nam. Certainly way’ Democratic Leadership Committee, con- this argument would have appealed to the trolling the Democratic Party, could not have strong anti-war sentiments among the Demo- been pleased that renewed popular interest cratic base. Instead, the Kerry campaign re- in the ‘Viet Nam experience’ was providing a sponded by further emphasizing his creden- surrogate outlet for airing concerns and ques- tials as a military hero, capable of fighting a tions about imperial ambition and military smarter, more strategic war on ‘terror’. adventurism. Kerry’s advisers seemingly em- To have hoped for another response from a phasized the necessity of reframing this ‘un- US presidential candidate at this point in time ruly’ meaning of the Viet Nam War within a may appear as wishful, even utopian, think- dominant discourse of American innocence ing to many. Be that as it may, it is nonetheless abroad. After all, the Clintonista Democratic difficult to completely understand the uncon- Party would like nothing more than a return ditional pass that the US left gave to Kerry- to the Washington-led globalization boom of the-born-again-militarist. Much like Walter the 1990s, but now more publicly envisioned Benjamin’s angel of history, Kerry-the-deco- as the marriage of free trade and militarily in- rated-war-veteran turned his face to a past lit- stalled democratic ‘freedoms’. Under these tered with the accumulated human and social conditions, Kerry’s silence is understandable, wreckage of decades of war and imperial am- if repugnant. bition and called it progress, or at least neces- Nonetheless, a cascading chain of silences sary. Clearly, this is not the ‘turning’ that of great consequence followed from Kerry’s Kerry anticipated in 1971, as he movingly re- repression of his own past, thwarting political counted the barbaric disregard for human life discussion during the 2004 presidential cam- central to US policy in Viet Nam to a US Sen- paign. Kerry could not or would not seize ate committee stunned into respectful silence. John Kerry’s Viet Nam quagmire | 167

Or, for that matter, it is not the end to misbe- In the face of Kerry’s defeat (I write these gotten wars that Kerry envisioned as he and concluding remarks the morning after the hundreds of other Viet Nam veterans threw election as Kerry’s defeat seems assured), their medals onto the White House lawn the the US left should continue to press the next day in one of the most moving and ef- same demands: for an immediate with- fective protests of that era. While the intelli- drawal from Iraq on moral and humanitar- gence and courage that Kerry brought to ian grounds, for the restoration of democ- bear in his efforts to end the Viet Nam War racy within the US, and for an end to the were missing-in-action in the 2004 cam- military colonization of the globe. In this, we paign, it is, oddly enough, this younger can surely learn from the younger Kerry’s Kerry that many on the US left thought courage and conviction in bringing about an (hoped, perhaps) they were supporting for end to the Viet Nam War. But we can no the presidency. The idea that the passionate longer wait for the promise of the ‘wink’ to younger man was ‘winking’ at us, while the be fulfilled, whether by Kerry himself or the old militarist shored up the support of un- Democratic Party. The struggle to defeat the decided mainstream voters echoed through- neo-conservative agenda, it is now abso- out multiple public and private conversa- lutely clear, will take place outside of the De- tions on the left. mocratic Party. We can start by persistently In spite of this, it is impossible to recall renouncing the US’s genocidal and tortur- how often I had been involved in conversa- ous conduct in Iraq and elsewhere. Here tions that turned on the hope that this other surely the testimony of an earlier generation Kerry would still surface, and that he would of veterans, Kerry among them, as well as transfix us once again with the force of his their dramatic demands for immediate with- moral argument. Why, my friends and ac- drawal from Viet Nam can stand as inspira- quaintances seemed to be saying, does Kerry tion. This is the useful history of the Viet not simply seize hold of the memory of US Nam War that must be reclaimed in this atrocities in Viet Nam that the Republicans present moment of danger. Yet as those vet- conveniently threw onto the public stage to erans and other opponents of the Viet Nam fan the hopes that he embodied in the past. A War so clearly understood, and pace David sense of the unfinished business of history – Harvey’s (2003) argument in The new imperi- what Walter Benjamin (1968) understood as alism, opposition within the US alone will the realizable promise of the past – loomed not secure the reversal of the raw militaristic large over this process of collective search- imperialism offered up by the neo-conserva- ing, or longing, for evidence of Kerry’s tives. We will continue to need more than a courage and determination as a young vet- little help from our friends. eran to manifest itself in the present, calling into question the new face of US military im- perialism. Most everyone on the left, and a Acknowledgments good many people who would not embrace that political label, surely recognize now that This article was written during the last few a persistent opposition to the expanding days of the 2004 US presidential campaign, ‘war on terror’ is necessary to forestall fur- and was finished on the morning after the ther catastrophe. Yet I hope it is also evident election. The speed with which it was com- by now that support for a presidential candi- pleted was possible only because of the will- date who promised to expand the military ingness of Patricia Musante, Don Kalb and forces in Iraq, and to ‘support the troops’ Rex Clark to read and comment upon it ‘on with the latest military hardware and arma- the turn of a dime’. They saved me from ment, has greatly reduced the chances for se- making egregious errors of fact and judg- curing a reversal of the neo-conservative ap- ment. Others, I am sure, remain. They are my proach to foreign relations. responsibility alone. 168 | August Carbonella

Notes Harvey, David 2003. The new imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1. As was widely reported in the media, George Hersh, Seymour M. 2003. Talk of the town. In: W. Bush used his family influence both to se- The New Yorker, November 10, 2003: pp. 41–4. cure a much coveted assignment in the Texas Johnson, Chalmers 2004. The sorrows of empire: Air National Guard and to avoid punish- militarism, secrecy and the end of the republic. ment when he failed to report for duty the New York: Metropolitan Books. last two years of his tour. Khalidi, Rashid 2004. Resurrecting empire: Western footprints and America’s perilous path to the Mid- dle East. Boston: Beacon Press. Lutz, Catherine 2001. Homefront: a military city and the American 20th century. Boston: Beacon References Press. Smith, Neil 2003. American empire: Roosevelt’s ge- Books and articles ographer and the prelude to globalization. Berke- Benjamin, Walter 1968. Theses on the philosophy ley: University of California Press. of history. In: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illumina- tions. New York: Schocken Books: pp. 253–64. Music Bloch, Ernst 1996. The utopian function of art and Billy Bang 2002. Vietnam: the aftermath. Audio literature: selected essays. Cambridge, Mass.: CD. Justin Time Records. MIT Press. Old Crow Medicine Show 2004. Big time in the Carbonella, August 2003. Memories of imperial- jungle. O.C.M.S. Audio CD. Netwerk Records. ism: the figure of the Viet Nam veteran in the age of globalization. Focaal: European Journal of Film Anthropology 41: pp. 153–76. Davis, Peter 2002. Hearts and minds. DVD. Crite- Ellsberg, Daniel 2003. Secrets: a memoir of Vietnam rion Collection. and the Pentagon papers. New York: Penguin Morris, Earl 2004. The fog of war: eleven lessons Books (reissue edition). from the life of Robert S. McNamara. DVD. Co- Gill, Leslie 2004. The School of the Americas: mili- lumbia Tristar Studios. tary training and political violence in the Ameri- Noyce, Phillip 2003. The quiet American. DVD. cas. Durham and London: Duke University Miramax Home Entertainment. Press. Pontecorvo, Gillo 2004. The battle of Algiers. DVD. Harootunian, Harry 2000. History’s disquiet: Criterion Collection. modernity, cultural practice, and the question of everyday life. New York: Columbia University Press.