A Rumor Of War

by Philip Caputo

People didn’t want to know about the tumults of the warrior’s heart, to hear the cries that came howling straight out of the heart of darkness, the belly of the beast. Both sides of the Vietnam debate in the United States shared a suspicion, at times a contemptuousness, of the veteran. The war was fought by the children of the slums, of farmers, mechanics, and construction workers. The debate was waged by elites. The establishment that got us involved in Vietnam did not send its sons and daughters there; in fact, its sons and daughters were in the forefront of the antiwar movement. By the time Saigon fell in 1975, a lot of “hawks” had an almost cartoonish view of the Vietnam veteran as a drug-addicted, undisciplined loser, the tattered standard-bearer of America’s first defeat. The Left drew an equally distorted picture of him as, at best, an ignorant hardhat with a gun, at worst as a psychopath in uniform. In the eyes of the antiwar movement, each soldier was the incarnation of what it considered a criminal policy. As the citizens of a democracy, the noisy patriots and protestors had a right to their opinions about Vietnam but not, it seemed to me, to the smug righteousness with which they voiced them, because they hadn’t been there.