For Powell and the senior commanders of Desert Storm, liberation of Kuwait is the military objective. But liberation from Vietnam’s bitter legacy looms as a prized–if unarticulated–target of opportunity.
Time after time in the gulf war’s early weeks, the idioms and images of Vietnam have flickered through the comments of military leaders. Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Horner, who flew 111 combat missions over North Vietnam, praised civilian leaders for the “freedom” his staff had in planning the gulf air campaign. Powell, wounded near the Laotian border in 1963 when he stepped into a pungi-stick trap, sidestepped a reporter’s questions on body counts. “Allow me to duck that for the time being,” he said. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, a Vietnam battalion commander who led a patrol from the middle of a minefield, has stressed rules of engagement designed to limit civilian casualties. Memories of combat–and of a conflict marked by civilian micromanagement, a collapse of military discipline and the erosion of domestic support–have left indelible marks. “Vietnam is sort of in the DNA,” says Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University.
The notion of gulf-war-as-catharsis gets its momentum from the commander in chief. Vietnam “cleaves us still,” George Bush said in his Inaugural Address. But, he added, “no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” Bush seldom mentions the crisis now without attempting to finalize the divorce between Vietnam and the American psyche. On K-Day, he evoked Dwight Eisenhower (“The liberation of Kuwait has begun”) and told a television audience that Americans would not fight Saddam Hussein “with one hand tied behind them.” Later that week he assured the troops that antiwar demonstrations did not reflect overall American sentiment. At the Pentagon, Powell and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney–although stingy with hard information about Desert Storm–have used down-to-earth rhetoric, not the starchy, systems-analysis argot of the McNamara era. The war, Cheney asserted, “cannot be scored every evening like a college track meet or a basketball tournament.”
But in their self-consciousness about Vietnam, Bush and his generals are marketing a pernicious myth. The implication that Vietnam was lost because politicians wouldn’t unleash the military to pursue a victory overflies an important reality: lack of deep-seated support from the South Vietnamese. Massive force, dispatched to Southeast Asia in the early 1960s to decapitate North Vietnam, may have prevented the war as we came to know it. But many historians now believe it could only have been a temporary obstacle. “I don’t think we really could have held South Vietnam indefinitely,” says Russell Weigley, a military historian at Temple University. “We were building on quicksand there.”
While strategy, tactics and terrain are vastly different in the gulf war, Vietnam remains the emotional template for many senior officers on the ground in Saudi Arabia. Despite the public displays of bravado, warriors bloodied in Vietnam privately express anxieties about the war going off course. “They see Vietnam as the paradigm: the war doesn’t end quickly, home-front support erodes, a lot of people are killed, the Army is racked by internal dissension,” says Moskos, who interviewed troops in the field late last year. Young officers, with an image of Vietnam formed by books, television, movies and dinner-table histories provided by military parents, are more gung-ho–perhaps naively so. West Point has no Vietnam history course in its required curriculum. An elective “Korea, Vietnam and the American Military Experience,” covers the Indochinese conflict in seven lessons. This year’s primary text was written by Lt. Gen. Phillip Davidson Jr., Gen. William Westmoreland’s chief intelligence officer.
For Bush, Powell, Schwarzkopf and other architects of Desert Storm, the specter of a Vietnam-like slippage in support from an impatient public undoubtedly looms large. Critics wonder if it may compel the premature opening of a bloody ground offensive–when a more methodical air campaign might ultimately reduce American deaths. “[Military leaders] face a very deep dilemma. They want the war to be over quickly, but they also want to have minimum casualties. Those are conflicting objectives,” says Joshua Epstein, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. “I think they’re betting that few casualties, and a long war, would be worse for public support.”
It would be unfair to suggest that hunger to redeem the collective military honor will eclipse the better judgment of Desert Storm’s command. “Nobody who has seen the guy next to him decapitated by a piece of metal is going to see this as an opportunity to cleanse the institution of some perceived shortcomings,” says Robert Griffith, a historian and former armored-cavalry platoon leader. If the road to Kuwait City puts a few more miles between the American warrior and his Vietnam nightmare, it will be the realization of an important mission. In the end, though, this war is certain to lead to its own irredeemable horrors.
