The Feel-Good War

For its part, the military was hell-bent to eradicate the so-called Vietnam syndrome, which it claimed paralyzed it from pursuing excellence on the battlefield. Above all, the generals didn't want to suffer from the original sin of that war - having to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. What the landscape of Vietnam might have looked like had the Pentagon been allowed to shoot its wad is anyone's guess, though downtown Baghdad suggests the possibilities. And while some pacifist sentiment in the Pentagon apparently blocked the use of thermonuclear devices, the generals got to fight their war the way they wanted and left the theater of action without any of the blue-balled discomfort experienced in Indochina.

In any American town older than its McDonald's, you'll find a monument to our Union dead, some verdigris statue of a doughboy, or a plaque hammered into a high school bench engraved with the names of grads who fell in battles from Belleau Wood to Chosin, and, maybe, a newer sheet of bronze specially cut for Vietnam. And if you look long enough on an otherwise nondescript lawn in San Pedro's Fort MacArthur, across from the Korean peace bell, you'll even find a forlorn-looking rock the shape and size of a big meat loaf, bearing a tiny inscription saluting Desert Storm's 293 body bags.

Office workers brown-bagging it beneath a town-square statue, or kids making out on that high school bench, may not think much about these memorials, but such bits of bronze and concrete probably give them some subconscious assurance of national purpose - or, at least, of good intentions. Who knows, though, what feelings the meat-loaf rock at Fort MacArthur inspires. What kind of America is it that squanders its wealth to send soldiers 8,000 miles to smother another army with bulldozers? Not the same country whose men of arms swung open the gates of Bergen-Belsen, or even, for a brief moment, glimpsed an American peace through the smoke of Hiroshima. Instead, we are the kind of country that could absorb Vietnam and Desert Storm in the national bloodstream even while we threw Frisbees, watched TV, listened to the Stones, made money. These things we still do - and now we think we can bury the world alive.