“Saigon . . . Shit. I was still in Saigon .”
That word. Saigon . It’s like a word from a fairy tale or a nightmare, a make believe place redolent of exotic magic and sudden danger. A word that remains only on sun-bleached maps and in fading memories. A place that had existed on a frontier of conflict and destruction whose liminal status made anything possible. At a distance, at least partially, this is how I experienced it. Born in the year the massive city finally fell to forces that threatened and beleaguered it for thirty years, I was at my mother’s breast when the long struggle in Vietnam ended on the battlefield, when Saigon fell.
Growing up in the 80′s I was continually reminded of Saigon . As a nation we were still not reconciled to Saigon ‘s disappearance or our role in its vanishing or its uncomfortable place in our collective consciousness. In 1982, as a child whose television consisted primarily of PBS I watched the multi-part documentary Vietnam: A Television History. Even at a young age, I knew America had lost. The possibility of loss in the midst of Cold War provoked an uncomfortable anxiety. At the same time, my curiosity about history and the thunder of helicopters over jungle canopy and the chaos of firefights enthralled me.
One image, the execution of a suspected Viet Cong on Saigon ‘s streets traumatized me. As a child I had no words, no categories for the sudden, livid brutality that appeared so quickly on my television screen. It was one thing to see real life “Cowboys and Indians” gunning it out in the forest or gunships firing into a tree line, but this, this execution that was both personal and utterly cold roiled my guts. I was overwhelmed with a revelation about the world that my eight year old eyes were not ready to see. This image still stands in my memory and my mind’s eye as a moment of horror forever happening and forever suspended in time.
In 1985 our National Geographic arrived in the mail featuring the Vietnam Memorial. It was something I had seen on the news but only in passing. The wall itself was dark and imposing, a scar in the ground. Like Vietnam it was mysterious, encapsulating the ineffable within its dark granite while reflecting the images of old soldiers whose wounds and sorrows were stretched in pain across their faces. Wounds evident even to a kid like me.
As child of the 1980s the Vietnam War was not over. It was continually being re-fought in the rhetoric of politicians, at the movies and on TV. Ronald Reagan and Chuck Norris held out hope that some of our soldiers were still there, and were, like our decisive victory, still missing in action. History was not final. Our experience of Vietnam could be rescued. Our men could be saved as long as courageous men –men unsullied by politics– true believers like Colonel Braddock and John Rambo were willing to go back to Vietnam . Perhaps then our war could be won. We did not have to lose, and through Braddock and Rambo we could even experience victory. These fictional heroes would return to Vietnam again and again to demonstrate America , and the American soldier’s, physical and moral superiority.
Not all cinematic visions of the 1980′s attempted to provide viewers with a vicarious sense of victory. Platoon and Full Metal Jacket explored moral poles of military conflict and the ambiguity of the reality between them, while Hamburger Hill reflected on the arbitrariness and futility of the struggle in Vietnam .
In spite of the many explorations and interpretations of Vietnam on film, nothing could seem to provide an encompassing explanation of what had happened there. They all addressed the national wound differently, but the wound remained. The (first) Gulf War may have restored our national confidence and the passing of time may have eased the poignancy of Vietnam’s pain, but the possibility of dealing publicly with the issues of Vietnam in any way other than art was effaced by Reagan’s reappraisal and the conservative embrace of the conflict into black and white categories: Our soldiers were always honorable. Our cause was always just. It was the weak and the misled that caused us to suffer defeat.
Within this narrative we had not lost, not really. We had only been forced out by dopey, pacifist hippies and vacillating politicians. It was not conceivable that a Third-World country could have driven a superpower from its shores, but the conservative narrative of defeat-snatched-from-victory still conflicts with images of crowded, overwhelmed helicopters fleeing the American embassy in Saigon and leaves us with a cognitive dissonance rife with questions.
In spite of our recent military adventures, in spite of counternarratives, questions remain. Saigon hovers at the edge of our national memory, accusing us from the past, desiring satisfaction. Saigon whispers “how?” and “why?” Saigon remains a word that invokes the bleak hangover of Vietnam that lingered through my childhood so that part of me, part of us, part of our national self, is still left behind– in the shadow of Saigon .
