Iraq Replaces Vietnam as Metaphor for Tragedy

For almost three decades after U.S. helicopters flew over a smoke-filled Saigon, Vietnam served as a vault of tragic metaphors for every American to use. In movies, in literature, someone who went to 'Nam was someone who came back a wreck, a traumatized soul who has seen or committed too many horrors to ever return to normal life. In politics, Vietnam was a hard-learned lesson that continued to influence U.S. foreign policies. It was an unhealed wound, the cause of post-traumatic stress, the stuff bad dreams were made of, hell in a small place.

Then came Iraq. Many comparisons have been made about the two wars. But what Iraq may have finally done is not so much remind us of Vietnam as ultimately usurp it from our national psyche.

Fighting the Vietnam War brought a multitude of symbols and icons to the American mind. A new set is now being acquired in the current war. One can almost imagine one era being replaced by another in the way that two kids might trade cards: "I'll take My Lai for your Haditha"; "I'll take 'Hearts and Minds' for 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'"; "Let's have Vo Nguyen Giap and Ho Chi Minh for Muqtada al-Sadr and Osama Bin Ladin"; "I'll take Tiger Cage for Abu Graib"; and "Let's have your Gulf of Tonkin for my WMD."

In another generation, when a future U.S. president sends troops to occupy some intransigent country on a dubious objective, American pundits will most likely ask this familiar question made new: "Will it be another Iraq?"

Yet, for a long time, Vietnam functioned as a benchmark for spectacular American failure, and despite subsequent successful U.S. overseas ventures, it remained a deep, searing wound. It took some time after the war's end before movies were made and books sold on the topic. There was a willful repression of America's only military defeat, followed by a flourish of Vietnam novels and movies. Together they constructed a mythic reality around the nation's experience in Vietnam that challenged our old notion of manifest destiny and examined our loss of innocence.

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