WILL THIS JOLT PUT VIETNAM BEHIND US?

BY JOAN VENNOCHI

The Boston Globe
September 20, 2001

IS AMERICA'S POST-VIETNAM WAR SYNDROME FINALLY OVER? HAVE THE PASSAGE OF TIME AND THE HORRIFIC JOLT FROM THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACK REVERSED OUR AVERSION TO HAND-TO-HAND, FIGHT-TO-THE-DEATH COMBAT IN A DISTANT LAND?

The president who spent that war in the Texas Air National Guard rather than overseas is talking as if it is. The American people are polling as if it is. Asked the question yesterday while en route to the rubble of the World Trade Center, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war hero, said "Profoundly, yes - providing the strategy is clear and ultimately makes us safer and not more at risk." Interpretation: Maybe.

The Greatest Generation spawned a next generation that questioned war, challenged it, and, yes, ran from it. Thirty years later, the great national divide between Vietnam's protesters and its veterans is closing up. Is the ground beneath us strong enough to launch the kind of war our leaders are suggesting?

In the twilight of their lives, every World War II veteran is a hero. But when it comes to Vietnam, the definition is still tortured by ambiguity. Remember, just four months ago, the country was shocked to learn that former Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, another decorated Vietnam war hero, led a group of soldiers in a brutal 1969 raid that killed unarmed women and children.

The uproar over that revelation speaks to a lingering American queasiness about what war actually is and what it takes to win one. The terrorists who took over planes and slammed them and their innocent passengers into thousands of more innocent bodies had no such queasiness.

In the spirit of some holy war that seems obscene if not insane to the ordinary American, they willingly killed themselves and everyone around them.

We must assume the terrorists' parents understand and accept what we cannot. Are America's parents willing to accept their own children's deaths in the "war against evil" declared last week by President George W. Bush?

Kerry, who is considering a run for president, said yesterday: "I think the country is ready to make people pay a price. It is obviously ready, and absolutely unified, to try to apprehend Osama bin Laden and make him and anyone who is associated with him pay a price. What the country is prepared to do in the long haul is a more complex question."

It is true we have a more visceral incentive to fight than we ever did in Vietnam. There are fresh, horrid memories of bodies raining down on the streets of New York City, not some hypothetical domino theory of communist domination in distant lands. But, the enemy is just as elusive.

The collapse and incineration of two skyscrapers filled with people is enough to make peaceniks of yesteryear embrace the death penalty as just punishment for the perpetrators. The problem is, the actual perpetrators are already dead. Capturing and punishing the evil minds behind the deed may be possible, but it will not be quick or easy.

This country is being primed for a tough, sustained battle against bin Laden and any country that harbors him, with Afghanistan the presumed target. The Russians know how stubborn the enemy can be, and the Bush administration is already acknowledging the difficulty in identifying bombing targets in Afghanistan. The Clinton administration tried and failed to bring down bin Laden.
In Massachusetts, where the humor veers quickly to the irreverent, political consultant Michael Goldman noted, "We can't find Whitey Bulger. How are we going to find bin Laden?"

Can we really "smoke 'em out and git 'em?" as Bush said the other day? "That's a very legitimate question," responded Kerry. "That's why, in my judgment, I'm for smaller, more clandestine, smarter, and quicker operations."

Kerry said the Bush strategy is not yet clear. "If all you do is create a lot of innocent victims and wind up with a more radical Islamic state in Pakistan with nuclear weapons, are you safer? We have an obligation to ask those questions. Patriotism isn't blind."
Still, if there's an organized force out there, bent on destroying US cities and killing US civilians, can patriots be picky about the war they are willing to wage?

God bless America. But thank God our sons and daughters cannot be involuntarily vacuumed up into a long, hard, and possibly unwinnable war. Not yet, anyway.

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