For more than three decades, the makers of American opinion have evaded the full significance of the Vietnam War - the mendacity, the brutality, the futility. The collective amnesia has been exacerbated by a counter-offensive from the right. Like German nationalists after World War One, American revanchists tell a story of a stab in the back: they insist that the American counter-insurgency was on the brink of victory when it was done in by a coalition of liberal journalists and cowardly college students, who undermined the nation's will to fight. As a veteran of both the US navy and the peace movement during that time, I remember a different story, one that includes the impossibility of the military mission, the ubiquity of dissent among enlisted men and junior officers, and the sympathy of anti-war activists for young men caught up in the war machine. The notion that opponents of the war were hostile to ordinary soldiers is simply false. Yet the stab-in-the-back narrative persists.

LRB 23 September 2010 | PDF Download