1973
What the country needs now at the end of the Vietnam war is not amnesty but amnesia.
It is time to put the whole thing up in the attic, to store it away up there with the snapshot of Granddaddy as a young man, foot up on the running board of his Model T Ford. Up there where we keep the old Blue Eagle (NRA, kiddies) window decal, the 1945 newspaper with the headline about Roosevelt’s death, the stamp collection we started that year we had the mumps and couldn’t leave the house. The Vietnam war ought to go up there very first thing in the morning, so we can start forgetting about it right away. The sooner the better.
What a protest that’s going to produce, what an overpoweringly reasoned lecture of right thought, summoning Freud, history, Founding Fathers, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Joseph Pulitzer and the memory of Heinrich Himmler, among others, to prove that forgetting is bad for you, particularly if you are a heavily muscled superpower half mesmerized between Cotton Mather and Krafft-Ebing.
The great forgetting wouldn’t be forever, though. The attic isn’t for things we want to forget forever. Things get put up there because we don’t know what else to do with them this year, or because they are in the way right now, or because we want to get them out of our lives for a while without throwing them away.
Later, when we have changed and become different people, we will go up there and examine this or that on the chance that it will tell us something about who we were once, what sort of times we lived through, what kind of people we have become. Granddaddy’s snapshot is up there for that reason. Years ago, it just looked dully and depressingly old-fashioned—that straw boater, those sleeve garters, that Model T—but we didn’t want to throw it out. Later, we sensed—being too young to know it then—we might want to come back to it when we ourselves were twice as old as Granddaddy was when the snapshot was taken, come back to it and try to grasp something about time, change, youth and the grave.
That is why we now need a great national forgetting. Nobody knows what to make of Vietnam right now, and it is in our way. We try to get back into the old American habit of liking ourselves again, and we keep stumbling over Vietnam.
Politicians keep shoving it into our shins. People with axes to grind keep using it to win this argument or clinch that. There is evidence that office seekers intend to use it for the next generation, as politicians after the Civil War used to “wave the bloody shirt,” whenever it is in a politician’s interests to bring out the absolute worst in us.
We need time to forget, to let it yellow in the attic, to get on with tomorrow’s things. And how will we win this time? It will cost everyone something.
It will cost both the hawks and the doves a concession on amnesty. So let it be. Let there be amnesty for the draft runners, deserters and refusers who went to jail, if that will bring us the quiet that helps forgetting.
There must be amnesty too for Lieutenant Calley, and an end of accusations against war criminals. Fair is fair. If justice is to be suspended in the higher need for amnesia, it must be justice equally suspended for all sides, or there will be no justice, and certainly no quiet.
The doves will also have to grant the Government’s points about the morality of the war and the excellence of its conduct. Until they do, the Government will never give us quiet.
Let all doves who look to the future shout out loud, therefore, the following declarations: to wit, that there was good and just reason for the war, that the Government fought it honorably, that President Nixon was always right about how to end the war while almost everybody else was consistently wrong and that this is really peace with honor, and plenty of it, which he has brought us. A hard dose for doves, assuredly, but worth the swallowing if this Government, and other governments to come, quiet down about the war for simple lack of someone to argue with, and let us have sweet forgetfulness.
And what of the dead and the wounded? Shall they be forgotten with the rest? The question can only be answered with another. Are they honored in this endless ugly snarling about whether or not they died to no purpose, or are they simply forgotten in the gratifying emotional binges Americans experience in the uproar?
Later we shall be able to come back to them and make more sense of their deaths and mutilations, but we must age before we can do that, and become different people. We must put more time between this business and the people we are to become, so that those people can come back to it, some remote day in the attic, with the maturity and detachment to grasp what it was about, this war that made them older and perhaps wiser.