UA English Professor, Veteran Reveals Thoughts on Vietnam

Following this release is a transcript of portions of an interview Beidler conducted with UA’s media relations office on the similarities he sees between America’s involvement in Iraq and Vietnam.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Dr. Philip D. Beidler, professor of English at The University of Alabama and armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam, says he sees less and less of the common soldier’s hard-won perspective in what America has since made of that war.

Each passing year dulls our senses of immediacy about Vietnam’s costs, he says, opening wider the temptation to make it something more necessary, neatly contained, and justifiable than it should ever become.

In his most recent book, “Late Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam” published by The University of Georgia Press, 2004, Beidler draws on deeply personal memories to reflect on the war’s lingering aftereffects and the shallow, evasive ways we deal with them.

Beidler brings back the war he knew in chapters on its vocabulary, music, literature and film. His catalog of soldier slang reveals how finely a tour of Vietnam could hone one’s sense of absurdity. His survey of the war’s pop hits looks for meaning in the soundtrack many veterans still hear in their heads.

He also explains how “Viet Pulp” literature about snipers, tunnel rats and other hard-core types has pushed aside masterpieces like Duong Thu Huong’s “Novel without a Name.” Likewise we learn why the movie “The Deer Hunter” doesn’t ‘get it’ about Vietnam but why “Platoon” and “We Were Soldiers” sometimes nearly do.

As Beidler takes measure of his own wartime politics and morals, he ponders the divergent careers of such figures as William Calley, the army lieutenant whose name is synonymous with the civilian massacre at My Lai; and an old friend, poet John Balaban, a conscientious objector who performed alternative duty in Vietnam as a schoolteacher and hospital worker.

Beidler also looks at Vietnam alongside other conflicts – including the war on international terrorism. He once hoped, he says, that Vietnam had fractured our sense of providential destiny and geopolitical invincibility but now realizes – with dismay – that those myths are still with us.

“Americans have always wanted their apocalypses,” writes Beidler, “and they have always wanted them now.”

Beidler is the author of five previous books including “Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in their Generation” and “The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering.”

The War in Iraq: An Interview with Philip Beidler from a Former Soldier’s Perspective

Q. What are your thoughts on the war in Iraq and why we’re involved in it?
PB: The government got us into this on bad intelligence and now they can’t get us out. It’s a catastrophe that started on the basis of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) that didn’t turn out to be there and alleged Al Qaeda connections that turned out to be nonexistent. The Congress swallowed the whole package and gave [Bush’s] national security advisor and his defense secretary a blank check just like they wrote Lyndon Johnson a blank check for the “Gulf of Tonkin.” And now we’re in a mess.

I say this as an old junior officer whose heart is with the Army and the Marines and with my memories of people I loved. I say this as a person who believes in the values of our soldiers who are serving decently and honorably and doing what American soldiers do. I’m not some knee-jerk ivory tower academic naysayer. My heart is with the privates and the lieutenants, and I’m just heartsick. A little piece of me goes every time one of them goes.

Q. The turnover of power is scheduled for June 30. Is it going to happen?
PB: If they [U.S. Government officials] have an ounce of sense they’re going to declare a victory, leave, and turn it over completely. And then they’ll somehow find the capacity to feel ashamed of the enormous killing that’s going to go on whenever we leave. If we leave six weeks from now or if we leave six months from now we leave catastrophic killing and suffering as a result of our being there in the first place.

Q. Why is that?
PB: The situation is totally unstable. There are factions and religious and ethnic animosities that we don’t know anything about; the fact not withstanding that we’ve already done something unheard of. We’ve gotten Shiites and Sunnis to forget 1,500 years of religious hatreds and killing each other. They’ve found someone else they hate even more than each other. I mean, we’re champions.

In Vietnam one of the things that we discovered is that a 3,000-year-old Asian culture really deep down inside didn’t want to be a 200-year-old democracy. We are finding that out about a place they used to call Mesopotamia, which translates as “the land between the rivers.” A lot of people call it the cradle of civilization. They don’t want to be us, and we began on the assumption that they wanted to.

Q. You say Americans are arrogant. Is that too easy a way to look at our involvement, just to say we’re arrogant?
PB: I don’t think so. One of the most prominent critics of the Vietnam war was Senator William Fulbright. And it was he who coined the phrase, “the arrogance of power.”

We believe we are a redeemer nation. We believe and even subscribe to what I call the myth of American historical innocence. We believe incorrectly in our own good intentions, and we pair that up with a sense of our own geopolitical invincibility. I thought those were two myths the Vietnamese war would have put to rest.

Americans don’t want to hear that we’re not an innocent and invincible people. Americans want good wars, and they want clean wars, and they want all their wars in the win column. Americans don’t like things complicated. We’re not very patient. And that’s why people who have a long tradition of waiting out the enemy are going to beat us every time. We want instant gratification. And we want it all real clean and uncomplicated and in sound bytes. We don’t want to see video clips of dead civilians. It spoils our supper when we’re watching the news.

Q: What’s your background?
PB: I was an armored cavalry platoon leader in Vietnam. Armored cavalry is what would be called today mechanized infantry. We did basically recon missions in the jungle – ambushes and convoy escorts. When I came back from the war I went to graduate school and then got my Ph.D. in English and have, over the years, tried to talk about the war in its relation to American culture, American popular culture and popular myth. This is the first book I’ve ever written about cultural meditation that also includes personal experience and autobiographical reflection. I just had never seen fit to talk about some of these things before. It was really hard to do, but I felt people ought to know. Particularly when 35 years later we’re in a war.

Q. Tell me about being a soldier.
PB: You know, everybody says we have a professional Army. Well, we don’t. What we have is a blue collar Army without the draft. If we had a draft you’d see these American fire eaters change their minds about this war REAL quickly if it were their kid.

The problem is that when I say “soldiers” I see the people I used to call my kids and I was just a kid myself [in Vietnam]. And today I see the Iraqi civilians and children and I see images of my own wonderful 10-year-old daughter. It just tears my heart out that we’re killing men. We are killing women. We are killing children. We are killing them left and right and by the bushel. And when we are not killing them, the various irregular forces readied against us are killing them, or are getting them into the middle so that we can all kill them while we’re trying to kill each other.