Nightmare. Bloodbath. Massacre. Quagmire. Four words that not only sum up the American experience in Southeast Asia but also characterize the language of defeat in American military history. The Vietnam War turned these four concepts into synonyms of failure, adding them to the long list of consequences that engulf that war’s legacy.
We refer to ‘nightmare’ when acknowledging the death of the American Dream in Vietnam. We turn to ‘bloodbath’ when discussing My Lai as a metaphor for the brutality of the Vietnam War. ‘Massacre’ we summon when we discuss the picture of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a shackled Vietcong suspect in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968. And ‘quagmire,’ perhaps the most interesting of the lot, we reserve for those times we are asked to summarize the Vietnam War in a single word. Quagmire means to sink, “a bog having a surface that yields when stepped on.” In other words, quicksand (ironically enough, both words start with the letter Q).
Tom Engelhardt, in his book The End of Victory Culture, calls ‘quagmire’ a “withdrawal word,” a sinkhole that could do little else other than suck American troops into the depths of perpetual combat with no favorable resolution in sight. To get to the point of saying the war has turned into a quagmire is to start thinking of calling the troops back home. Engelhardt tells us that in 1965, Clark Clifford (unofficial adviser to President Johnson) warned that Vietnam “could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open ended commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.” To sink in war is to accept the inevitability of defeat, that victory cannot be a reasonable scenario given a quagmire situation. Victory, on the other hand, came to Vietnam as a word that Washington desperately wanted to include in its war talk. But victory belonged to another war: World War II. Different war. Different results. Different language.
That Vietnam became the quicksand of American military history turned that war into an universal metaphor for war done the wrong way. It also made every other American war keep its vocabulary close-by, under heavy guard against Vietnam, hoping not to get infected with its linguistics of failure.
American history textbooks (like The Americans, published by McDougal Littell for high school use) made sure not to mix Vietnam war talk with other American war talks. The Spanish-American War is still referred to as the “Splendid Little War,” World War I keeps its claims to being the “The Great War,” and the Second World War continues being remembered as the ultimate example of ‘victory’ and ‘liberty,’ as safeguarded by America’s “greatest generation.”
The First World War’s case is interesting because, while ‘bloodbath’ flies around it more frequently than desired, it is mostly associated with the language of industrialism and empire. I refer, of course, to more popular interpretations of the war, mainly those found in survey books and high school textbooks. The same cannot be said of Vietnam. It only knows the language of death, defeat, and moral corruption, and history books have made sure it stays that way, on its own corner.
The First World War had a clear resolution. The allies won and the combined forces of the ‘evil empires’ perished. That World War I industrialized killing and that around one million men were either killed or wounded in the Battle of the Somme alone did little to change the linguistics of that war. The allies didn’t sink or fall through a bottomless pit of combat with no end in sight. They won. Quagmire averted. Vietnam ended with people flying away in overcrowded helicopters off American embassies. The Americans left behind a destroyed countryside, crop burnings, a history of rape and civil rights violations, and a very public withdrawal of American forces. World War I? Victory. Vietnam? Quagmire. History, so it seems, forgets more than it remembers. And it has a worrying obsession with endings. They do more to structure the enduring meaning of a war’s language than any other event within the history of the war itself.
Much like the Korean War, which stays ‘forgotten,’ Vietnam came up with a language, a war dialect, that no one else was interested in speaking. But the wars that came after it had no choice but to fall in place with it. The current War Against Terrorism certainly did, with both The New York Times and The Washington Post adding ‘quagmire’ to the long list of words that fed their skepticism against Operation Iraqi Freedom. Eight days into the war and both newspapers were already comparing Iraqi fighters to the resilient North Vietnamese. That Saddam Hussein was overthrown just eighteen days later did little to no effect in shifting the linguistics Vietnam had firmly set in place.
Vietnam spoke a harsh language, of strange realities and of the moral implications behind them. After the war, victory was to be a concept locked in between quotation marks (except in the case of the Second World War), and horror could not escape being set as the Vietnam standard. No war has been able to skip over its linguistics after it. To be labeled as a war turning into a quagmire not only means losing public approval, it means channeling the memory of the Vietnam War and its linguistics of defeat. And this speaks to the legacy of the Vietnam War: the quagmire. Vietnam turned war into quicksand, a swamp, a very deep bog. And in the process it changed the official definition of the concept, for quagmire now truly means “a war having a surface that yields when waged wrong.”
