Fictional Vietnams

Yesterday, the NY Times Book Review devoted its cover to a pair of novels about the war in Vietnam. One dates back to the war itself:

Karl Marlantes’s first novel, “Matterhorn,” is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes — a highly decorated Vietnam vet — spent 30 years writing this book. It was originally 1,600 pages long; now it is 600.

The book often dwells on the dysfunction within the Army that became increasingly apparent as the war dragged on.

One of the most heartbreaking themes of the book is the racial tension between black troops and white troops — a tension that boils over into outright threats and eventually murder. For a reporter who has covered the military in its current incarnation, the events recounted in this book are so brutal and costly that they seem to belong not just to another time but to an other country.

Soldiers openly contemplate killing their commanders. They die by the dozen on useless missions designed primarily to help the careers of those above them. The wounded are unhooked from IV bags and left to die because others, required for battle, are growing woozy from dehydration and have been ordered to drink the precious fluid. Almost every page contains some example of military callousness or incompetence that would be virtually inconceivable today, and I found myself wondering whether the book was intended as an indictment of war in general or a demonstration of just how far this nation has come in the last 40 years.

One is left feeling that facile comparisons of Afghanistan to Vietnam amount to a mockery of Vietnam.

And yet it is only by comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam that we can appreciate the institutional strength of today’s all-volunteer force.