War Talk: a short essay on the Vietnam War and its language

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      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.”

Captain America: The Winter Soldier- Endorsing Good Wars

By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Is World War II still the Good War? This was the title of an Adam Kirsch New York Times article exploring just that, the goodness of the Second World War. It came out in March 2011, when Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed Americans to question the extent of confidence a country could extended towards military might and strategy in the twenty first century. Militarism as a virtue, as a primary national value, seemed to be dwindling in representational prowess. The distance breached between morality on the home front and morality on the battlefield had broadened much to the disadvantage of war as an American ideal. Fighting in the Middle East made military conflict an impersonal experience, much detached from the cohesiveness of the American experience. More importantly, it became its own entity, with its own politics and its own history. In other words, it went opposite the Second World War’s route, that of war as the defining principle of American society. Kirsch will conclude that World War II will stay “good” so long as it stays living history. Living history, in turn, can instruct, it can still impart teachings of its own and tell people that there actually is a right way to conduct war. Of course, Kirsch explains that such histories need to take into account ambiguities and morally gray areas. But when memory is so highly elevated as to be considered near mythical, then, we have another thing entirely. War was “good” back then. Therefore, war can still be “good”. And Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) endorses just that idea.

      Captain America means many things, but most of them rely on his war to make sense. The Second World War lives through Steve Rogers the same way Steve Rogers lives through it. It might make the character unstuck in time and it might keep him from being a more universal metaphor for war in America, but it keeps the war’s memory fairly grounded in what Kirsch referred to as living history. The character’s many discourses have been touched upon before. He upholds conservative politics, endorses a continued state of war, exalts ultra-patriotism, and survives as a testament to the goodness of the Second World War. These things hold true in the movie. 

      Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Captain America: The Winter Soldier keeps with Captain America’s longstanding character conventions and gives us a fairly safe war movie. Rogers is now a part of SHIELD, just in time to watch it fall into the hands of HYDRA. In true sequel fashion, old enemies continue to haunt Rogers. HYDRA remains the Nazi stand-in par excellence (if HYDRA is not an offshoot of Nazism then nothing is), and is the main villain of the story. Captain America favorites such as Arnim Zola and obscure villains such as The Leaper pop up to keep true followers anxious for more. But it is the Winter Soldier that makes the movie stand above standard superhero fare. The character contrasts so starkly with Rogers that the whole HYDRA plot could have been scrapped so as to focus entirely on the Winter Soldier. In fact, the Winter Soldier is more a secondary story arc playing to the overarching plot that deals with war on a more general level. 

       The inclusion of the Winter Soldier could have been an interesting counterweight to the discourses of old residing in Rogers. The Winter Soldier, created by Ed Brubaker (who makes a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film) is revealed as Roger’s lost sidekick, Bucky. Brubaker broke one of the only rules Marvel comics resisted touching (only Bucky stays dead) to make Captain America face his war with an added sense of ambiguity that judges his sense of being as superficial and overtly simplistic. In the comics, when the long lost sidekick returns as a Soviet-trained super-soldier Rogers knows he not only faces Bucky but the war that turned him against America.

     Bucky’s Cold War turns history into a lesson that descends upon Rogers and lectures him on the darkness American history carried out of the Second World War. He distorts the idea of goodness in war by ridding himself of the conflict that grounded him in a bygone era that barely resonated later on. Captain America slept through the Cold War, conveniently frozen at the bottom of the ocean so as not to witness the United States fall into hysteria, anti-communist paranoia, and proxy wars that strayed farther still from the mythic principles of World War II. It was a time Rogers could very well find war to be at its most un-American. But the fact he slept through it meant his example, and that of the Second World War, did not shine bright enough to keep America from derailing into morally ambiguous territories. The Cold War could not be saved by the Good War because it was frozen in time, a memory that sought shelter rather than facing the realities of a world dictated by nuclear politics. So why not right that wrong with Captain America and a big silver screen production that pits him against a villain borne out of the Cold War?

     That Rogers faces the Winter Soldier can be seen as just that, an attempt to save the Cold War after the fact. Captain America, unfrozen, looks back into the history that pushes the Winter Soldier into the will of HYDRA and sees an opportunity to once again prove his war’s might can save all wars, turn them good. All throughout the movie the audience is subjected to scenes of Rogers visiting museum exhibits dedicated to himself, his old uniform in display. Once we see the old uniform standing above a display of the Howling Commandos, we know that, in the end, Captain America will revert to that uniform (not a suit) and go into battle as a World War II soldier first and a superhero second.

     It is never clear which war weighs more on the Winter Soldier throughout the movie. Arnim Zola is the Winter Soldier’s creator in the film, more a Nazi than a Soviet, but the movie does stress his secret Soviet assassin past. The fact Zola plays Winter Soldier’s Frankenstein keeps the character between wars. He is the darkness between. The thing war is capable of but should not be. Either way, it falls to Captain America to prove that his war, one no one questions as being his, can save both the day and the idea that war can still be a virtue if not a moral responsibility. And keeping to our expectations, the day and war is saved, and very convincingly. Captain America in his old uniform explodes on scene as a war god, the ultimate authority on militarism and how Americans should interact with its war powers. So, is World War II still the Good War? The answer is obvious if you are Captain America. Can War, in all its dimensions, be Good forevermore? Yes, but only if it follows in the footsteps of the Second World War.

Hero Making: A Quick Note on History and Captain America

Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

      Much of the history of the Second World War rests on the idea that goodness prevailed as its moral drive. It came naturally, part of the political package that guided American soldiers to the beaches of Normandy and the treacherous geography of Japan. Rooting out evil was the main objective—evil being the exact opposite of what America stood for. In a sense, the Second World War became a mirror through which Americans could see themselves reflected as the fairest nation of them all. Sure, historical accuracy calls for a reexamination of the Great Depression as the official instigator of intervention in foreign affairs (sometimes overriding Pearl Harbor as the obvious spark to that war), but pick any popular history book on World War II and you’ll be hard pressed to think of any other reason for America stepping up to the Germans other than pure goodness.

      It is of no wonder (and up to this point a meek point to think otherwise) that comic book readers became enamored with superheroes baptized in the fires of World War II as the supreme representatives of their fantastic alternate realities. Of the many that came, it was the one dressed in the colors of the American flag that captured the imagination of readers, Captain America. If we accept the Second World War as iconic in scope regarding World History then we must recognize that it also has the capacity to create icons and legends in its own right, both real and fictional.

     Captain America came out of that war as such an icon. He punched Hitler square in the jaw and might just have well sealed the victory for those who escaped to the pulpy pages of the comic book to find the endings they so intensely desired. Captain America’s war with the Germans was quick, clean, and righteous. But what really made a mark on comic book history was that Captain America set the standard on what heroism should actually be. Most importantly (and most dangerously), it made war experience the absolute standard on what makes a hero, well, a hero.

      It is perhaps in Jason Aaron’s Ultimate Captain America #2 that we get a true look at the psyche of the hero that made war the event that turned men into heroes. Deep inside the jungles of Vietnam, Captain America looks for Frank Simpson, the Captain America of the Vietnam War. Simpson was turned super-soldier for Vietnam in the absence of Steve Rogers (Captain America’s civilian name). But like many, he receded into the madness of his war. He deserts only to resurface as an enemy of the state in 21st century, carrying the full weight of his war to the present.

     The mission becomes an opportunity for introspection, for making sense of a war Rogers did not participate in. Contemplating the jungle and its complicity in keeping Americans away from victory, Captain America dwells on what his country should mean for the men that fight for it. He says:

Looking around this godforsaken place, I could almost understand if Simpson had just snapped. I saw plenty during the war. Good men who just reached their breaking point. I’ve been there myself. I’ve looked that fear in the face. I remember 1944, waking up one morning in the Ardennes forest, freezing cold, knowing we were surrounded on all sides by Nazi Tiger tanks, and I couldn’t move. It took me hours to get out of bed. I could’ve broken then. Like the men I saw eat bullets from their own guns. At the time, I felt like I could almost understand why they were doing it. But flipping sides…Frank Simpson betrayed his country. He said he wanted to show me what America really stands for. But he’s the one who’ll be getting the lesson. America doesn’t stand for cowards and turncoats. Not my America. The America I know’s always been worth fighting for. Even dying for. And sometimes killing for.

      It is brilliantly simple and easy to digest. Captain America lays the blueprint for heroism in pure black and white. It is devotion, with honor, to one’s country and the disposition to kill and die for its safety that makes men heroes. Stray from these guidelines and you will most probably end up being an enemy, a lost citizen fallen from the grace of his country’s innate disposition for goodness. This is but a simple metaphor for how the history of war is digested in popular culture.

     In History, we fight and debate over the origins of war, on the degrees of justness and righteousness in them. We forget that the men that fight them, the ones that become heroes, sacrifice so much that only outsiders get to enjoy the excitement of their heroics in the aftermath. Tom Brokaw’s oral history The Greatest Generation, for example, proves this by going to such lengths as too delve straight into hero making. Brokaw will say the Second World War bred the greatest generation of Americans the history of the country had ever seen. And probably will see, if Brokaw is concerned. The sacrifices of the soldier are secondary to the story because, in the end, they were heroes. Spielberg adds his line with Saving Private Ryan and many other directors, authors, comic book writers and artists followed suit.

 
     And so it goes with history. We seem to unconsciously regard war and its heroics as if they were mythical feats of greatness. They become innocent rites of passage that turn men into Captain Americas. Scars are expected while ugliness and extreme violence are accepted as realities that make men heroes. History, then, becomes the notary. An entity with the authority to make official the transformation of men into heroes. But it also becomes the thing men at war strive to. There is no force as powerful as a people’s expectations. There may be warnings on the dangers of history repeating itself, but that is precisely what people seem to want most of the time. We want more wars because we want more heroes. We want to imagine a world of Captain Americas because without them, well, what’s the point of history?