Tragedy of Iraq pushes trauma of Vietnam War into background
- By Andrew Lam
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, July 2, 2014
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[By Luo Jie/China Daily] |
A few years ago in a New York subway train I witnessed a scene that will always serve for me as an important marker of a sort.
A man in ruffled clothes walked up and down the aisle and panhandled in a loud voice. “Can you help a Vietnam vet? I’ve got issues and I’ve been out of work. Folks, can you help?”
All of a sudden a young man, who had been watching him, stood up and exploded: “You liar! You’re too young to fight in ‘Nam. Want to know issues? I’ve got issues. I just came back from Iraq.”
There was a collective hush, and some people fled to another car.
For almost three decades after US 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 had seen or committed too many horrors to ever return to normal life.
In politics, Vietnam was a hard-learned lesson that continued to influence US foreign policy. It was an unhealed wound, the cause of post-traumatic stress, the stuff bad dreams were made of.
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.
Symbols and icons
Fighting the Vietnam War brought a multitude of symbols and icons to the American mind. A new set has been acquired with the war in Iraq.
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 Ghraib,” and “Let’s have your Gulf of Tonkin for my WMD.”
Two and a half years after the US pulled out of Iraq, the country has crumbled into a bona-fide failed state, with Baghdad under siege by ISIS (jihadist militants from the Islamic State), who are having a run of Iraq, and some analysts now worry that ISIS will commit mass genocide against Iraq’s Shiite population if Baghdad falls.
The war in Iraq started with Operation Shock and Awe but ended in a fizzle and, some would argue, in an epic exercise in human futility.
Here are some facts:
Iraq claimed 4,487 American lives, and left 32,226 Americans wounded, according to Pentagon statistics.
According to Iraqbodycount.org, the number of Iraqis who died from violence ranges between 103,000 and 114,000 during the US occupation.
The Congressional Research Service has estimated the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom at around US$806 billion, and President Obama has said the cost of the war is over US$1 trillion.
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