The Home Front: Exorcising an Old Demon

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

Hello, Kuwait. Goodbye, Vietnam. Next month 16 years will have passed since Americans and their friends scrambled from rooftops into helicopters and left Saigon to Vietnam's victorious communists. The pain of that and so many other Vietnam memories -- the dead children of My Lai, the shock of Tet '68, the coups and countercoups, the fraggings, the drugs, the invasion of Cambodia, the killing of American students at Kent State -- somehow only increased as the years passed. When the U.S.-led forces raced across Kuwait and Iraq last week, however, they may have defeated not just the Iraqi army but also the more virulent of the ghosts from the Vietnam era: self-doubt, fear of power, divisiveness, a fundamental uncertainty about America's purpose in the world.

The need for such an exorcism must have been felt by the anonymous U.S. Marine who, shortly after Kuwait City's liberation, paid a call on the deserted American embassy. He carried with him an old American flag, which he left at the gate of the embassy compound. Asked why by an Associated Press reporter, the Marine said the flag had been given to him 23 years earlier by a dying comrade in Vietnam. For the Marine in Kuwait City, and for many Americans who took justified pride in the U.S.'s military performance in the gulf, a circle had been completed, a chapter closed.

The crowds across the country that cheered the President's cease-fire announcement -- and his declaration that "by God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all" -- were celebrating far more than Saddam Hussein's defeat. They were savoring the country's first major military victory since 1945. "This largely puts Vietnam behind us," says political-science professor Joe Cooper of Rice University. "We have the confidence now that we can define foreign policy objectives and carry them out. This will have the same effect as World War II."

In Vietnam, says Tip Hale, a Chicago insurance salesman, "we didn't have a cause that united everyone. Bush did it right. He got the cooperation of other countries, brought the U.N. in and let the experts run the war . . . If there was a war you could be proud of, this was it." Republican pollster Robert Teeter predicts that the gulf victory will especially affect the attitudes of young Americans. "These are people who had not seen the country either lead or succeed in a big way on anything for a long time, whether it was Vietnam or economic competition," says Teeter. "Now they've seen us succeed."

The Vietnam experience has been on the minds of Americans from the day George Bush dispatched troops to Saudi Arabia last August. The President took pains to vow that the mistakes of the only war the U.S. ever lost would not be repeated in the gulf. And they were not. From the massive and rapid military deployment to Bush's decision to seek formal congressional approval for the war, from the Pentagon's avoidance of macho rhetoric to the insistence by antiwar protesters that they supported U.S. troops, Americans of all sorts seemed determined to get it right this time. To the extent that any of Vietnam's bitter aftertaste was present, it was in the tension between the press and the military. And even that had dissipated to some extent by last week, when General H. Norman Schwarzkopf delivered his extraordinary briefing in Riyadh.

During Vietnam, generals like William Westmoreland and politicians like Lyndon Johnson paid a heavy price for their errors, misjudgments and deceptions. In contrast, the U.S.'s gulf war leaders -- especially Bush, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell and Schwarzkopf -- will reap rich political and professional rewards. The odds favoring Bush's re-election have increased dramatically in the past few days, and the silence from Democrats who were once thought all but certain to run against him has become conspicuous. In fact, the only jarring political news for Bush out of the war so far has been the finding in some recent polls that a lot of Americans would like to see Colin Powell replace Dan Quayle as the President's running mate next year.

Bush and the brass aren't the only ones who will benefit. In towns across the nation, troops from the gulf war are sure to be received as heroes. From New York City to San Diego, local officials are laying plans for mass rallies and parades for the returning troops. "It's going to be a hell of a welcome bout," says Jim Schroder, president of the chamber of commerce in Oceanside, Calif., home of Camp Pendleton. The brass bands, speeches and ticker tape are a far cry from the shame and silence that greeted Vietnam veterans, who came home feeling they had no choice but to slink back into "the world."

The terrible feeling of having been abandoned by a nation that had sent them to war caused a certain ambivalence in some Vietnam veterans and their families as they witnessed the sudden victory in the gulf. Louisville attorney Pat Durham, whose husband Ronald was killed in Vietnam, recalls how their son Billy tearfully concluded that "my dad died for nothing." Billy Durham is now 28, and served with the 1st Infantry Division in Saudi Arabia. His mother is confident that the memory of Vietnam will not dampen the celebration or mute the hurrahs when he returns. "This country can be very proud," Pat Durham says. "I don't think we could have had a better cause to fight for."

Some will doubtless conclude that the rightness of the cause and the swiftness of the victory have restored America to its pre-Vietnam place in the world, and that potential adversaries should consider themselves fairly warned. "Anyone will have to think twice about messing with the U.S. again," says Detroit advertising executive William Miller, who had initially opposed the gulf war. "Before a dictator attacks another country, he will have to look down the barrel of Uncle Sam's gun." It has been some time since talk like that has been heard, and believed, in the U.S. Wrote humorist Lewis Grizzard in the Atlanta Journal and the Constitution: "I think there ought to be a national day of gloating."

In the early '60s, John F. Kennedy proclaimed that the U.S. had "a problem in making power credible, and Vietnam is the place." Vietnam was not the place. But was the gulf? Last week George Bush declined to say so. Rather, he described the military result as "a victory for all the coalition partners . . . for the United Nations, for all mankind, for the rule of law and for what is right." The President was merely being diplomatic, of course, which was only fitting, since diplomacy had played an important part in assuring Iraq's defeat. But the fact is that this war fulfilled the dream John Kennedy had enunciated for Vietnam: it demonstrated not just that America is powerful but that it is credibly so.

There is a potential danger that the U.S., having rapidly and easily defeated Iraq, might be tempted to go for its guns too quickly in the future. "I don't think the nation's shame about Vietnam was such a bad thing," says Harvard Law School student Morris Ratner, 24. "To the extent that it kept the U.S. from playing international cowboy, it was a good thing. Unfortunately, I think this war will make future Administrations far less reticent in using force to deal with international problems."

Other voices of caution can be heard in the midst of all the cheering. "I'm not convinced that our military will be invincible forevermore," says Patrick Santana, a graphic designer in Boston. Los Angeles city councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, a liberal antiwar activist in the '60s who has supported the gulf war, takes a somewhat different tack: "If the Vietnam experience prevented the United States from asserting itself in issues of high moral purpose, and some people would say that it has, then this diminishes that reluctance. But if Vietnam has made us careful about asserting our influence -- I hope that doesn't leave us."

Probably it won't. Americans were haunted by Vietnam, but they also learned from it. For proof of that, there is no need to look any further than the meticulous way in which George Bush and his military and civilian team went about engineering their stunning, quick triumph in the desert.