Anthony Burke

jetzone@ozemail.com.au

 

“Tell me, pray,” said I, “who is this Mr Kurtz?”

 

“The chief of the Inner Station,” he answered in a short tone, looking away. “He is a prodigy…. He is an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else. We want… for the guidance of the cause entrusted us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wider sympathies, a singleness of purpose… and so he comes here, a special being…”
 
–Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (55)

 

"Vietnam is still with us."

--Henry Kissinger (Karnow 9)

 

Ironic perhaps, that we begin with the words of Henry Kissinger–Harvard academic, international relations theorist, member of the Trilateral Commission, of the boards of American Express, R.H. Macy, CBS, Revlon, Freeport-McMoRan, and former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. Of course Kissinger, placed so powerfully at the locus of several influential discourses of world order in the post-war age, had his own axe to grind. He went on to say: “[Vietnam] has created doubts about American judgement, about American credibility, about American power–not only at home, but throughout the world. It has poisoned our domestic debate. So we paid an exorbitant price for the decisions that were made in good faith and for good purpose” (Issacson 142).

 

The crisis to which he alludes would be viewed and characterised differently by the victims and opponents of the war on one hand, and on another, by the elites to whom “Vietnam” stands as a signifier of defeat, failure, crisis, and further paranoia. The conservative scholar Daniel Bell has written that the “American Century”–heralded by Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941–“foundered on the shoals of Vietnam” (Bell 204). What is happening here? I suspect a new story of the West, an ironic metanarrative, that seems to appear everywhere: a long journey, a great sea voyage, a shipwreck. Or as Lyotard has written: “The narrative function is losing… its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal” (The Postmodern Condition xxiv).

 

Perhaps these men overstate the setback which the defeat in Vietnam represented for American global interests, but their views are no less significant for that. Their words acknowledge a certain challenge to their power, and in turn the power of the institutions, structures, and systems to which they devote themselves and their thought. This challenge both arises out of the United States’ (and broader western) experience in Vietnam, and coalesces around it. Other markers include the 1973 oil price shocks and other third world attempts to assert control of vital commodity markets and prices, as well as the global economic stagnation and inflationary spirals that the war helped to provoke. Further ongoing crises in the project of western economic expansion and modernisation have been provided by the economic nationalism of third world elites, and the struggles of millions for decolonisation, human and civil rights, democracy, and economic and political self-determination. In such a context, “Vietnam” then becomes both a complex and problematic historical event and a tableau, a stage upon which further related crises and problems–mythological, epistemological, political, cultural, and economic–are played out.

 

This essay thus takes as its object some of the more influential and paradigmatic historiographic texts of the war: Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, A History, a companion to the PBS television series; Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie; Robert McNamara’s In Retrospect; and Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. While there is an immediately “political” question of their power as vehicles of a certain historical “reality” of the war, there are also questions about the very fact of their appearance in our culture. In The Perfect War James William Gibson argues that during the 1970s and early 1980s the war was “abolished” in America, “progressively displaced and repressed at the same time it was written about”; yet by 1983-4, it had suddenly become “a major cultural topic… as if a legendary monster or unholy beast had finally been captured and was now on a nationwide tour” (Gibson 6).

 

I am motivated here by an element of this paradox. My interest in these particular texts arises because while they form their narrations in relation to the vast array of events which are assumed collectively to constitute the war, they also do so in relation to a series of broader cultural narratives, conflicts, and myths that reach into the very bedrock and possibility of our modernity. This essay takes up the theme of politics and violence by addressing the way reason–as a form of state power, an index of civilisation, and a movement of historical progress–has been problematised within these texts. I make no claim that they are the most representative of the vast memorial literature on the American war in Vietnam; likewise it must be acknowledged that there are many texts which contest their apologetics for the war, in many different ways, from films like Born On the Fourth of July and Full Metal Jacket, to the memoirs of servicemen and books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches.¹ I suggest that these texts reveal key themes of the post-Vietnam literature as this literature relates to a crisis in U.S. foreign policy and national identity. I also suggest that these texts are riven with internal contradictions that derive from the cultural contradictions they attempt–and fail–to reconcile.

 

Specifically, these texts attempt to reconcile two antithetical impulses: the first opens up a vast aporia within modernity’s (and America’s) claims to reason and culmination, an event Lyotard characterised as an abyss within enlightenment thought, and to which Habermas’s work is also addressed; the second, more sinister, seeks recuperation. Here no such aporia is acknowledged, and reason becomes an apologia for the violence of the war and the discursive architecture that drove its execution. The violence and self-certainty of the Cartesian paradigm are retained, and reason’s function as a promise of historical perfection is revived through a vast act of forgetting, especially in the writing of Francis Fukuyama. The essay concludes that the invention of formal models of non-coercive reason are of less use than a relentless suspicion of the concrete historical effects of such metaphysical claims to liberation.

 

McNamara’s War

 

If any event proved that “Vietnam is still with us,” it was the 1995 publication of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s memoir In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. McNamara had been recruited to his position in 1960 by John F. Kennedy from the Ford Motor Corporation where, not long before, he had been appointed its youngest President. He served the Kennedy and Johnson administrations until 1968 when, disillusioned with the war from which he then advocated America’s withdrawal, he was moved to the World Bank. Yet he had become so closely identified with the war in Vietnam that it became known as “McNamara’s war.” In 1995, after sixteen years, he broke his silence and declared the war a mistake.

 

The book’s brief opening sets out the war’s epistemological and strategic significance for western elites, the narrative strategy McNamara would pursue in an attempt to contain and recuperate its loss, and perhaps unwittingly, the aporias that would remain:

 

We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values.

 

Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.

 

I truly believe that we made an error not of values and intentions but of judgement and capabilities. I say this warily, since I know that if my comments appear to justify or rationalise what I and others did, they will lack credibility and only increase people’s cynicism. It is cynicism that makes Americans reluctant to support their leaders in the actions necessary to confront and solve our problems at home and abroad.

 

I want Americans to understand why we made the mistakes we did, and to learn from them.... That is the only way our nation can hope to leave the past behind. (McNamara xvi-xvii)

 

Here, in the slide from “principles and traditions” to “values and intentions,” is the causal movement which frames an event that saw as many as three million people killed, millions more wounded, and immense and lasting damage done to the environmental and genetic order. Here too is the moral quarantine that would partition “judgement and capabilities” from the beliefs which underlay them, in the hope that this event could finally recede from memory. But can “we” really leave “the past” behind in this way, obscure its legacy and prevent its continual irruption into the present? In this narrative the essential “values” that form the core of the modern American identity remain untainted, except for their application; the broad project of American foreign policy and mission remains, all delivered in the rousing tones and generalities of a Presidential Inauguration speech. (Whatever Clinton’s views on the war, such gestures of recuperation are crucial to making his talk of a new American century possible, a kind of speech impossible only ten years before.) In a formulation that mirrors much of the other historiography of the war, McNamara’s framing text makes a concerted effort to contain the war’s corrosive power and turn its “lessons” to future use. Or to put it another way, what we are witness to here is a modern Descartes contemplating the awesome consequences of the wrong method. Reason still seeks its own return.²

 

Both Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow open their histories in similar ways. Karnow’s book opens with the November 1982 dedication of Washington’s Vietnam memorial, “an angle of polished black stone” upon which are engraved the names of over 58,000 Americans killed or missing in action during the 20 years of direct American involvement there. These names, Karnow writes,

 

record more than lives lost in battle: they represent a sacrifice to a failed crusade, however noble or illusory its motives. In a larger sense they symbolise a faded hope--or perhaps the birth of a new awareness. They bear witness to the end of America's absolute confidence in its moral exclusivity, its military invincibility, its manifest destiny. They are the price, paid in blood and sorrow, for America's awakening to maturity, to the recognition of its limitations. With the young men who died in Vietnam died the dream of an "American century." (Karnow 9)

 

This passage casts the war in terms of a great rift, a break that sets the possibility of something redeeming (“a new awareness,” a “recognition of limitations”) against a panorama of loss. Karnow’s words here–particularly their reference to the doctrine of manifest destiny and the post-war vision of Henry Luce–also owe a great deal to Daniel Bell’s essay “The End of American Exceptionalism,” published a few months after the fall of Phnom Penh and Saigon in April, 1975.

 

Sheehan’s opening section is simply titled, “The Funeral.” Although it commemorates the death of a single American soldier, this event also announces the death of a great deal more. A state funeral, it is accompanied by all the mythological trappings of the American nation, signs which refer to its earliest origins and the decisive battles that brought it into being:

 

Six gray horses were hitched to a caisson that would carry the coffin to the grave. A marching band was ready. An honor guard from the Army's oldest regiment, the regiment whose rolls reached back to the Revolution, was also formed in ranks before the white Georgian portico of the chapel. The soldiers were in full dress, dark blue trimmed with gold, the colors of the Union Army, which had safeguarded the integrity of the nation. (Sheehan 3)

 

The funeral itself, held at Arlington Cemetery on May 16, 1972, was for John Paul Vann, around whose larger-than-life figure Sheehan organises much of the moral and political drama of his book. Vann had risen, despite many long-running conflicts with his superiors, from a position as American advisor to the South Vietnamese army in 1962, to wielding in 1971 so much influence within the U.S. civil-military bureaucracy and the Saigon government structure that he was “the most important American in the country after the Ambassador and the commanding general in Saigon.” His role is so decisive, or emblematic, that he was for Sheehan, “the soldier of the war in Vietnam”:

 

In this war without heroes, this man had been the one compelling figure. The intensity and distinctiveness of his character and the courage and drama of his life had seemed to sum up so many of the qualities Americans seemed to admire in themselves as a people. By an obsession, by an unyielding dedication to the war, he had come to personify the American endeavor in Vietnam. He had exemplified it in his illusions, in his good intentions gone awry, in his pride, in his will to win. Where others had become defeated or discouraged over the years, or had become disenchanted and turned against the war, he had been undeterred in his crusade to find a way to redeem the unredeemable, to lay hold of victory in this doomed enterprise. (Sheehan 3)

 

“A failed crusade,” “a doomed enterprise”: these writers build ambivalence into the very buttresses of their American Vietnam stories. The war for them is an event disputed, a nation divided and traumatised, a healing shadowed by the destruction and horror of times past. They will strike out in search of narrative unity, but find it continually thwarts them. Karnow’s introduction concludes with an attempt at recuperation, which focuses on the November 1982 march to dedicate the memorial:

 

From afar, the crowds resembled the demonstrators who had stormed the capital during the Vietnam war to denounce the conflict. But past controversies were conspicuously absent this weekend. Now Americans appeared to be redeeming a debt to the men who had fought and died--saluting their contribution, expiating their suffering. The faces, the words of dedication, and the monument itself seemed to heal wounds. (Karnow 10)

 

This is moving, and plausible enough in isolation–but when followed by the sobering argument of Bell’s essay, the troubles of veterans, and the bitterness and frustration of policymakers, the gesture seems weak. Karnow’s subsequent attempt at synthesis resolves little, and is accompanied by no small disingenuousness, clouding the USA’s responsibility for the violence and the disproportionate toll on Vietnamese society: “In human terms at least, the war in Vietnam was a war that nobody won–a struggle between victims. Its origins were complex, its lessons disputed, its legacy still to be assessed by future generations. But whether a valid venture or misguided endeavor, it was a tragedy of epic dimensions” (Karnow 11). Sheehan seems less convinced, saying that “some of those who had assembled at Arlington wondered whether they were burying with [Vann] more than the war and the decade of Vietnam. They wondered whether they were also burying with him this vision and this faith in an ever-innocent America” (Sheehan 8).

 

Crisis, Modernity, and American exceptionalism

 

Beneath their surface performance of American identity and strategic crisis, these texts are traversed by a deeper set of problems involving a broader structure of western legitimacy and self-identity. Allied with the direct strategic, economic, and mythological crisis of American power is a crisis of what Lyotard has called metanarratives–the narratives of progress, freedom, justice, and reason that have formed the silent philosophical buttresses of the vast cultural, economic, political, scientific, and technological transformations which modernity names. Robert Pippin, in a way similar to Habermas, has called this “the modernity problem,” a problem of the moral and ethical value of modernity, of its “legitimacy”–its ability to ground itself, its project, and its normativity (Pippin 1-4).³ Edward Said in turn links this phenomenon to the process in which a Western cultural identity was simultaneously constructed and destabilised through the historical experience of imperialism. Reproving Lyotard for not suggesting why the metanarratives came into question, Said suggests they went into decline largely as a result of the “crisis of modernism, which… was frozen in contemplative irony for various reasons, of which one was the disturbing appearance in Europe of various Others, whose provenance was the imperial domain… Europe and the West, in short, were being asked to take the Other seriously” (Said 223).

 

I would argue that we must treat the linkage of these themes, directly played out in Apocalypse Now, as a significant cultural effect; the result of the enormous historical sweep and deployment of the mythology which posed the United States as “the exception,” a new Europe in an untouched space, the newest societal embodiment of reason and progress. In particular Daniel Bell’s essay “The End of American Exceptionalism” traces out this process. He cites the philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley (whose 1726 poem proclaimed “Westward the course of empire”); Hegel, who proclaimed America “the land of the future” in his 1822 Philosophy of History; John O’Sullivan, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who espoused the United States’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions”–a doctrine used to justify the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of Florida and California, and the dispossession of native American tribes; and Publisher Henry Luce, whose February 1941 Life editorial outlined his vision of a post-war “American Century”–a “vision of America as a world power which is authentically American… America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind… America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice” (Bell 195-203).

 

These images Bell grouped beneath “the conception of ‘American exceptionalism”:

 

the idea that, having been "born free," America would, in the trials of history, get off "scott free." Having common political faith from the start, it would escape the ideological vicissitudes and divisive passions of the European polity... [and] as a liberal society... it would escape the dissaffections of the intelligentsia, the resentment of the poor, the frustrations of the young--which historically, had been the signs of disintegration, if not the beginnings of revolution, in other societies. In this view too, the United States, in becoming a world power... would, because it was democratic, be different in the exercise of that power than previous world empires. (197)

 

This was a revealing description of the ideals of “the American dream,” the construction of a distinctively American (meta)narrative of identity and progress in terms of the Hegelian “project of a total history” that seeks to “reconstitute the overall form of a civilisation” according to “the continuous chronology of reason” (Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge 8-9). But Hegel’s “Universal History,” and America’s shimmering place in its teleology, was not the only philosophical idea at issue here. In this description of “exceptionalism” (and in Hegel’s view of America as “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber room of old Europe”) was a sense that the United States was developing as a political and geographic space where Europe could re-invent itself and its project. By virtue of its youth, its seemingly boundless tracts of land, and its liberal ideals, America would escape the “signs of disintegration” represented by the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud and by a polity beset with poverty, misery, and class warfare.⁴ It was as if, by getting off “scott free,” America could escape the postmodern moment of its modernism, and initiate a pure, consensual modernity that would provide the foundations of future world hegemony and stand as a beacon for the civilised West. Furthermore, in Henry Luce’s vision and in its post-war foreign economic policy, America would spread these values around the globe, driving an enormous global cultural and economic transformation whose deeply contradictory effects are still with us.⁵

 

The phenomenon called “Vietnam” would strike a great blow to this arrogance, to America’s world-historical mantle, bringing into its culture all the “postmodern” contradictions long experienced by other western societies. Using a revealing metaphor, Bell wrote that “[t]he American century lasted scarcely 30 years. It foundered on the shoals of Vietnam” (204). But traumatic as the Vietnam defeat may have been for American elites, in Bell’s essay its effect was not restricted to questions of “credibility” and the narrowing of foreign policy options; the war became a stage for a number of related concerns about the health of the American polity, the structure of consensus, and the long-term survival of America’s economic supremacy. “Can we escape,” he asked in a sentiment worthy of McNamara, “the fate of internal discord and disintegration that have marked every other society in human history? What can we learn from the distinctive ideological and institutional patterns that have, so far, shaped a unique American society and given it distinctive continuity in 200 years of existence?” (205).

 

(Post)modern Echoes: Apocalypse Now

 

Apocalypse Now plays out such themes, linking them with the deeper malaise Lyotard and Said identify. While many commentators have attacked the film as flawed and overblown, I see the film’s failings as symptoms of the enormous cultural and philosophical contradictions it attempts to reconcile.⁶ The film’s title signifies these preocupations; it suggests that the war is not only a barely thinkable horror, but a moral and cultural disaster of major order–an event that precipitates the end of the world, the end of civilisation as we know it, the end of metanarratives.

 

In a gesture at once curious and apt, the film’s structuring narrative teleology is appropriated from Conrad’s classic modernist novel, Heart of Darkness (1902). Coppola’s is one of the few Vietnam films, in the torrent which have appeared, to rework a western literary classic in this way, placing the war squarely within a philosophical problematic which dates to modernity’s earliest self-awareness. The Marlow character, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), is an assassin sent by a shadowy command to terminate the activities of the Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, who is running operations without license from a base just inside the Cambodian border. He has been charged by a military court with murder, having ordered the execution of some South Vietnamese whom he considered to be double agents. Marlow’s movement between the various “stations” of the novel, toward the “heart of darkness,” provides Coppola with both a stage for a number of rather surreal narrative episodes, and a temporal space in which a more overtly political rhetoric can develop. Willard introduces his journey by saying: “I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet… weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz….” During the briefing for his mission, Willard hears a tape of Kurtz’s voice: “I watched a snail crawl across the edge of a straight razor–that’s my dream, my nightmare… crawling across the edge of straight razor, and surviving… we must kill them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army and they call me an assassin, what do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassins…?” Kurtz is described by the briefing general as “one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever had,” but he has somehow gone bad, his “ideas, his methods, became unsound.”

 

In a brief monologue, the General prefigures both the film’s political problematic, and much of its moral and philosophic scope: “Y’know Willard, in this war things get confused out there… power, morality and practical military necessity… out there with these natives it must be a temptation to… be God… because there is a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil, and good does not always triumph… sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.'” Coppola’s Kurtz is a hybrid figure who, like his precursor in Conrad, emerges slowly, an object of desire, speculation, and awe, providing the journey upriver with direction, significance, and mystery. Existing as he does, at the very heart of darkness, he functions as a space in which the film combines its broader moral/philosophic concerns with two countervailing rhetorics of the war.

 

Simplifying a little, these rhetorics divide on the morality of the war and the question of America’s failure. One rhetoric can be read in many of the film’s visual sequences (especially the helicopter attack on the Mekong Delta village commanded by Colonel Kilgore) and in some of the more isolated narrative episodes, and presents the war as a horrific and meaningless event where, in the words of Coppola, modern technology was used to perpetrate genocide (Connolly 65). The other rhetoric, which is developed via the figure of Kurtz and in Willard’s ruminations on his mission, is deeply at odds with this first reading. This rhetoric seems to suggest that Kurtz is less a monster acting “beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct,” than a harassed and strangely prophetic figure who truly understands the reserves of brutality and discipline that would have to be harnessed if America was going to prevail. In short, it repeats the crude argument that America fought the war with one hand tied behind its back.

 

This reading is suggested by an interpretation of Kurtz’s remarks on the tape played for Willard–the “snail” is the Vietnamese enemy, the “straight razor” it crawls across, and survives, is the American military machine. And early in the film Willard remarks–referring to his mission–that “charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.” As he reads Kurtz’s file on the journey, Willard’s admiration increases:

 

October 1967 on special assignment in Kontum Province 2 Corps, Kurtz staged "Operation Archangel" with combined local forces. Rated a major success. He received no official clearance. He just thought it up and did it. What balls! They were gonna nail his ass to the floorboards for that one, but after the press got hold of it, they promoted him to full Colonel instead. Oh man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to step out of it.

 

Similarly, Willard reads a letter Kurtz had addressed to his son, in which Kurtz expounds his philosophy on the morality and use of force:

 

In a war there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action. What is often called ruthless, what may in many circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it... directly, quickly, awake, looking at it. As for the charges against me, I am unconcerned. I am beyond their timid, lying morality. You have all my faith, your loving father...".

 

Reason is not a stable value here; reason is not a space outside which we are led to assume Kurtz exists. Certainly he has been denounced as “insane,” his methods called “unsound,” but such definitions are countered by as many valorisations of his approach. These tensions seem largely unresolved, but they point to a notion of reason whose morality is pliable and uncertain, a question of what reason allows, what it may find necessary or just; that it may, in this instance, allow and require a man like Kurtz.

 

Political Reason and History

 

I am not arguing here against reason as such, as if it could be easily abandoned–as Derrida reminds us, metaphysics supplies the very languages and terms with which we seek to undermine it. However I am suggesting that any use of reason, even mine, must acknowledge its problematic status; its features then must be differentiated, and its deployment into particular historical and institutional contexts be critically analysed. This view bypasses, for instance, Habermas’s efforts to reconstitute a universal rationality free from its past coercive implications, rather taking its cues from a poststructuralism which, in Robert Young’s words, “reanalyses the operations of reason as such” (8).⁷

 

While I have sympathies with Habermas’s broad political impulse, I am uncomfortable with a strategy that seeks to preserve the sovereignty and metaphysical claims of a transcendental concept rather than interrogate the specific forms of rationality which produce and enable events like Vietnam. A metaphysics that differentiates between reason and unreason in order to apply political and moral value is no longer viable and has in fact been undermined by the experience of the war. We need to think of such events not as irrational but as rational in one way or another. We need, that is, to jettison the emotive and superior value we place upon rationality and to define it as the operation of specific political and cultural deployments of power, that combine institutional, legal, economic, technological, and scientific frameworks in a strategic fashion. As Foucault comments, in the exercise of political power it “is not ‘reason in general’ which is implemented, but always a very specific type of rationality” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 73).

 

Of course the problem of reason relates to more than simply political efficiency: in these histories reason is further at issue both in terms of the moral and ethical values which have been imputed to it, and in terms of its place at the intersection of the broader exercise of political power and the life of individual subjects: how they are governed, how they govern themselves, and the values and ideals with which they do so. Reason as a measure of the efficacy of political power was a problem central to the seventeenth-century doctrines of “reason of state,” which Foucault discusses in his 1979 lectures published as “Politics and Reason.” Here the problem was not the link between the prince and the state, as it was in Machiavelli, but to reinforce, expand, and strengthen the state itself. Reason of state, says Foucault, was a search for “a rationality specific to the art of government” (Politics, Philosophy, Culture 58-77).

 

In the philosophy of history reason also had an added temporal function. In Kant’s 1784 essay “Idea for a Universal History,” reason was the “guiding thread” which supplied history with direction, but was also a powerful political technology: “a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct” (13). Hegel further elevated reason into a virtual law of historical development, which bound together the state and the individual subject in an inevitable and ideal embrace. The state was “the material in which the Ideal of Reason is wrought out” (9); individuals realised their “essential being” in “the union of the subjective with the rational will… the moral Whole, the State” (38). The possession of reason was also a measure of historical progress among peoples: History could only be taken up “where Rationality begins to manifest itself in the actual conduct of the World’s affairs (not merely as an undeveloped potentiality)” (59). Thus it was in Reason in History that reason of state and teleology became united–united in their concerns for the strength of states and mechanisms of government, in representing historical change as rationality, and in stengthening the union of personal and national identity, of individual freedom with the state and its destiny.

 

Failures of Reason

 

Both McNamara’s and Sheehan’s books take as their central themes this problematic of “rationality,” in particular the post-war search by American policymakers for an effective rationality of global power, a “rationality” that would forge an ideal combination of strategic assumptions, political strategies, and administrative, diplomatic, and military techniques with realistic and legitimate goals. This in turn was linked with the larger historical movement of reason of which the United States was seen as a vehicle–with the effect of obscuring this reason’s practical techniques and consequences within an emotive metaphysical smoke. In this John Paul Vann and McNamara appear as paradigmatic figures. McNamara was the figure of the Cartesian, mathematical policymaker who believed that the gradual and massive application of superior force would prevail, and who drew up fantastical assessments of troop numbers, casualty rates, and time frames for victory. Vann was the idealistic citizen, courageous warrior, and fierce anticommunist with an enormous organisational, tactical, and administrative ability–the soldier-archetype.

 

McNamara was a paradigm case of a thinker whose craving for certainty and whose almost unshakable belief in reason’s power to control reality contributed to the destructiveness of the war; however, this was entirely consistent with what James William Gibson describes as a “deeply mechanistic world view” which took hold in the postwar policy elite of the United States. He cites Kissinger as writing, without irony, that after 1945 American foreign policy had been based “on the assumption that technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in emerging countries.” This “scientific revolution” had “for all practical purposes, removed technical limits from the exercise of power in foreign policy.” Gibson suggests that, in such a system, the defeat of the United States by “a nation of peasants with bicycles” was literally unthinkable (14-16).⁸

 

Seeing this hubris so starkly laid out allows us to understand the dual crisis of technical and philosophical reason that the defeat engendered. There is a strong sense in both Sheehan’s and McNamara’s books that the crisis of these strategies and capabilities had an added historical force that brought the whole metaphysic of the American century (and its self-conscious echoes of exceptionalism and manifest destiny) into question. In particular Vann’s figure dramatises a conflict–within the nation, the government, and the U.S. Army–over the merits and prosecution of the war. Vann’s appeal for Sheehan is played out in two narrative streams: his military biography which, in recounting his constant battles with higher authority, dramatises his “candor,” “moral heroism,” and “truth telling”; and his personal biography which presents his character in more psychologising terms as torn between “a duality of personal compulsions and deceits that would not bear light and a professional honesty that was rigorous and incorruptible.” Here, his inner struggle becomes a metaphor for the unhappy mix of idealism and “dark compulsions” at the heart of the American dream (Sheehan 385).

 

While Vann conducted a principled campaign against the corruption of the Saigon regime, the brutality and slaughter of the air war, and the ruthlessness of many soldiers, he did so out of an underlying belief that the war was fundamentally just and that the range of politico-military strategies brought to bear had to be changed. Even after the Tet Offensive of January 1968, after which so many–including McNamara–advocated withdrawal, Vann remained a fervent proponent and became a major source of inspiration for Nixon’s “Vietnamisation” strategy. In this way, Vann functioned as a touchstone, a quasi-ideal locus of rationality by which other actors and institutions could be measured. Also, as far as can be gleaned from Sheehan’s account of Vann’s commitment to the state and his passionate refusal to lose faith in the war, he functioned to illustrate the limits to this rationality; thus the book oscillates between an immersion in the rhetoric which Vann’s story forms and a more detached and principled critique of Vann’s actions and thinking. Sheehan’s writing, for instance, does allow the reader to question the limits to Vann’s outrage, which, according to the story, lay at the core of his reputation for “moral heroism.” In 1968 Vann had encouraged CIA station chief William Colby in his efforts to have Thieu support the “Phoenix” program, which aimed to capture or assassinate the cadres of the NLF’s clandestine government (Sheehan 732-33). Colby estimated in 1971 that 28,000 people had been captured and another 20,000 killed under the program, which was in reality a gross and systematic violation of human and civil rights, the imprimatur of a military dictatorship its only legal justification.

 

Reason then, as a moral value, ultimately became a measure of necessity and discretion in killing, a discretion moderated and controlled by the requirements of political and military efficiency. Sheehan wrote that “Vann had no moral qualms about killing Vietnamese Communists and those who fought for them, nor was he troubled by the fact that he would be getting Vietnamese who sided with the United States killed to achieve American aims in Vietnam… he assumed that he and his fellow Americans in Vietnam had a right to take life and to spend it, as long as they did so with discretion, whenever killing and dying were necessary in their struggle” (12). In his introduction, Sheehan explained that Vann opposed the air war because “he considered it morally wrong and stupid to wreak unnecessary violence on the innocent” (6). Vann’s convictions brought him common cause with Senator Edward Kennedy, who had attempted to alleviate the suffering of the civilian war wounded and the refugees, and, Sheehan wrote, “had shared Vann’s concern for the anguish of the Vietnamese peasantry and had, like Vann, attempted to persuade the U.S. government to wage war with reason and restraint” (42, emphasis added). The form of words here is crucial, highlighting as it does the limits to this morality, which refuses to question the United States’ claimed right to intervene, and ultimately subsumes its denunciation of the violence beneath the pragmatics of the war’s continued prosecution. This attenuated morality united both men like George Kennan, who argued for Vietnam’s essential strategic irrelevance to the United States, and men like Vann who, wrote Sheehan, while concerned with reducing pain and suffering as much as possible, “believed with equal firmness that there was no choice but to sacrifice the Vietnamese peasants to the higher strategic needs of the United States” (535).

 

McNamara’s final chapter is entitled “The Lessons of Vietnam,” and turns around a list of the major causes for American failure. These include a misjudgement of Vietnam’s “geopolitical intentions” and of “the power of nationalism to motivate a people”; an ignorance of Vietnamese culture and history; a failure “to recognise the limitations of modern, high-technology equipment, forces and doctrine”; a failure to “draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion”; and a failure to “recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient…. We do not have the god-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose” (320-23). Of particular interest here is the crisis in McNamara’s (self) image as the epitome of the rational, controlled, mathematical policy-maker: a Cartesian psychological and administrative formation that exalts problem solving and strives for certitude and mastery. This insight is suggested to me by writers like Elizabeth Grosz and Christine Sylvester who challenge the gendered “normativity of sex” in international relations which aligns maleness, order, reason, and intellect in opposition to passion, disorder, and the body–values constructed as perpetually threatening, irrational, backward, and disruptive.⁹ This approach thus reveals the mechanistic world-view as self-consciously masculine. McNamara makes an interesting comment as his tenth “cause”: “We failed to recognise that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. For one whose life has been dedicated to the belief and practice of problem solving, this is particularly hard to admit. But at times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world” (323).

 

McNamara almost finds the understanding, but he fails at the crucial point. In that final metaphor of an “imperfect, untidy world,” the flaw in his recuperation becomes evident. While initially it had seemed that he had discarded the geopolitical baggage of an earlier period, it becomes clear that he has not. Lapsing into the propaganda of the time, he says that “the United States of America fought in Vietnam… for what I believe to be good and honest reasons… to protect our security, prevent the spread of totalitarian Communism, and promote individual freedom and political democracy.” Thus it wasn’t the fundamental strategic rationale which was wrong, or the metaphysical abstractions which underpinned the policy, but simply its field and application; McNamara argues that the “South Vietnamese… had to win the war themselves… external military force cannot substitute for the political order and stability that must be forged by a people for themselves” (McNamara 333).

 

With this mantra of “stability” McNamara betrays a refusal to acknowledge that the South Vietnamese state was, and always had been a lie; nor was it ever democratic and nor did the U.S. ever seriously encourage an open political system that would have had to include the NLF. He refuses to acknowledge, except in the most oblique way, that the loss in Vietnam was determined by politics, not force, and that the intervention was fundamentally unjust from the outset. Nor does he acknowledge the immense human destruction caused by the twenty-year U.S. operation and the responsibility–equalling that of post-war Japan or Germany–that needed to be borne. Ultimately he remains committed to the idea of rational judgement and decision, in all its metaphysical fullness. He mourns perhaps the optimism and certitude with which this rationality was once was applied, tempers the hubris a little, and hopes finally to heal and improve the interlinked system of ideals, belief, and administration the war so damaged. Much like George Bush rejoicing after the Gulf War at the defeat of the “Vietnam syndrome,” McNamara seeks to enlarge the possible field of rationality and intensify its nuances, rather than to interrogate its very grounds or legitimacy. The American Century, holed in the bow, can be refloated with the tide and resume its grand imperial voyage.

 

Aporias: Apocalypse Now Concludes

 

The final scenes of the Apocalyse Now demonstrate most clearly the moral aporias central to this body of historiography, in turn relating them to the broader problematic of western identity that structures Heart of Darkness. These scenes come closest in the film to any scenes in the novel, and circle around the question of the exact nature and moral value of the rationality Kurtz represents. The rhetorical outcomes from this climactic sequence, and thus the film as a whole, remain deeply ambiguous. The scene opens as Willard’s boat approaches Kurtz’s camp, which is guarded by local Montangard tribesmen who stand silently, their bodies painted white, a still assembly of latent threat. The compound is festooned with stakes topped by skulls and severed heads, and Willard is imprisoned for a time in a kind of “tiger cage” where Kurtz, his face painted like some demon, torments him. In the novel, Kurtz is dying when Marlow reaches him, his ruthlessness, power, and efficiency by that time a memory. Still, this section of the film presents the Kurtz of the novel, a Kurtz who “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” and in whom “there was something wanting”:

 

Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistably fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core... (Conrad 53)

 

Here the film appropriates Conrad’s moral sleight of hand, which, while portraying Kurtz as a destructive emissary of “progress,” ultimately projects his violence back onto the jungle, as if the colonial enterprise he represents had been contaminated by the primaeval land it raped. The Montangards function as symbols of darkness and death, a projection which in turn activates a long tradition of western fears of paganism, ritual, and cannibalism. Once again, the figure of the savage becomes the repository of the guilt and fear associated with imperial control, and the isolated figure of a man who has lost his reason stands in for the systemic violence of the European enterprise.

 

Yet while Coppola makes this somewhat attenuated denunciation, I also see another rhetoric available from this scene, one that seeks to expand the space of reason to encompass a necessary and intensified level of violence. This moment comes with a long monologue spoken by Kurtz, which is accompanied by none of the censure that surrounds his figure in the novel. Kurtz begins by saying that Willard has “a right to call me a murderer… but you have no right to judge me” and that “horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror, horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.” Kurtz goes on to recount a story of how, after his Special Forces unit had been inoculating children in a village, the Viet Cong came through and “hacked off every inoculated arm.” Kurtz describes how he first wept, and then realised

 

the genius of that, the genius to do that... I realised they were stronger than we because they could stand it... If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly... you have to have men who are more and at the same time who are able to utilise their primordial instincts to kill without feeling without passion without judgement... without judgement... because it is judgement that defeats us...

 

The Viet Cong atrocity recounted in this scene is pure fiction; what is interesting here, however, is the morality of this argument, a firmly contemporary nuance with no parallels in the novel. Simon During has commented that having chosen for his story “an old mythic narrative: the voyage to the underground and back” (one with other western antecedents, such as Dante’s Inferno), Conrad was confident “that the culture [could] narrativise its own reneging on enlightenment” (During 26). I sense that Coppola, having recognised how bound the Vietnam war was with that American enlightenment narrative, felt no such confidence. The myth was gone, wrecked on the shoals of this war; no return could be made. At the film’s end Kurtz is killed, hacked to death by Willard to the strains of The Doors’ The End. But however violent this scene, it ultimately seems meaningless, a climax without narrative significance, the plot’s attempt to conclude and solidify a logic that here founders on a chaotic diffusion of signs, falling and scattering like mercury. All that is left is Kurtz’s wish, like the America for which he is metaphor, to escape “judgement,” and a pathetic and chilling vision which could only intensify a rationality that so clearly, and terribly, has failed.

 

The Abyss of Reason

 

So why now, an abyss? Toward what space do these texts lead us, at a time when other prophets speak of “the end of History,” of the imminent culmination of human reason and endeavour, the realisation of an imagined, utopian space that our ideals, our system, and our masters have always been creating for us. This would be a space that admits no abyss, except as an already resolved contradiction, a loss without memory. Many will recognise Francis Fukuyama’s neo-Hegelian historico-philosophical claim, one I treat with the utmost seriousness, given that its broad contours mirror increasingly powerful global discourses of economic and cultural integration.¹⁰ Fewer perhaps would recognise how, in the 1992 book which expanded Fukuyama’s original essay, a broad cultural phenomenon of “deep historical pessimism” was posed as one of the fundamental challenges to his project. This was a symptom of “truly terrible events” like the Holocaust, the two world wars, or Stalin’s Soviet Union, events “in which modern technology and modern political organisation” were put “to the service of evil.” True to his claim and his reading of Hegel, Fukuyama subsumes these problems beneath a new “dialectical” optimism which takes the fall of “strong states” and the global spread of “economic and political liberalism” as its final proof (Fukuyama 3-12). Like McNamara, Fukuyama allows the past to recede so recuperation can begin.

 

The work of Lyotard thwarts an easy resolution of such contradictions. In “The Sign of History,” he argues that Auschwitz was a “proper name” which “places modern historical or political commentary in abeyance…. Adorno pointed out that Auschwitz is an abyss in which the philosophical genre of Hegelian speculative discourse seems to disappear, because the name ‘Auschwitz’ invalidates the presuppositions of that genre, namely that all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real” (163). Such events thus produce an immense “fission affecting the unity of the great discourses of modernity” (192). In my view, the French and American wars in Indo-China are just such an event: one which should, and does, produce a serious ethical and historic rupture in the value we place upon “modernity” and a philosophical rhetoric of historical progress. In particular, this event produces a “fission” in a particular historical experience of modernity in which the United States has been seen as a beacon and in which it has acted as a hegemonic and universalising force. Nor are these the only such events in American history: we could consider the destruction of native American tribes, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recent events like the support for the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, or the wars against Nicaragua, Panama, or Iraq. And most western nations, through their roles as colonisers or as post-war geopolitical and economic actors, share such stains.

 

This however does not amount to a wholesale polemic against something called “the enlightenment,” which, as both Foucault and Derrida have argued, still provides valuable tools for its own critique and continues to shape the languages in which we frame our thought, however critical.¹¹ Rather, as I have tried to do here through this discrete cultural history of “reason,” it forces us to differentiate its elements and to analyse its historical formation and deployment into particular systems of rationality. Many understandably worry that poststructuralist critiques such as Lyotard’s deny us the ability to distinguish between good and bad uses of reason, between destructive and ideal deployments of truth and power, and robs us of the idealist core of the enlightenment project.¹² While accepting the importance of such concerns, I don’t necessarily agree. This essay for instance has implied that the forms of reason deployed by the antiwar movement or the NLF had superior claims to those of the American war and foreign policy machines. Broadly speaking they did; however criticism ought to be made of the NLF’s frequent resort to brutality and terrorism (and the failure of sections of the antiwar movement to acknowledge this) and of its perversion into Stalinist repression as the form of the post-1975 Vietnamese state solidified.

 

In answer to such problems I suggest that we cannot be happy with a reason that retains its metaphysical gloss at the expense of a permanent and restless activity of self-critique. This is the insight I take from Lyotard and from deconstruction, and for which I believe Habermas to have been arguing in his own way. The idealist impetus can be retained, as long as we are also able to question the ways in which the universalising and teleological claims of such metadiscourses, whoever deploys them, too often close off moral and political contradictions and limit the scope of the possible. In the western context, such claims to reassessment or democratic culmination retain deeply misogynist and ethnocentric assumptions which legitimate a continued geopolitical economy of violence, along with neocolonial patterns of economic power and fundamental privilege. Above all, we must acknowledge the grave cultural problem present in almost all these texts: the contemporary recuperation of a metanarrative structure constituted by a simultaneous refusal to think properly its own abyss.

 

Notes

 

My thanks to Caroline Graham, Robert Young, and Jim George, and to the anonymous reviewers who made many useful suggestions for this essay. Thanks also to Simon During, whose 1987 essay “Postmodernism Or Postcolonialism Today” first brought my attention to the links between Coppola’s film, Heart of Darkness, and the philosophy of Lyotard. Although my reading of the film departs from his, a considerable debt is still owed.

 

1. For a survey of the veterans’ literature on the war see The Perfect War (462-76). Gibson comments that this literature “contradicts the war managers at virtually every level” yet has “failed to influence the conventional assessments by both the ‘error in judgement’ and the ‘self-imposed restraint’ schools. How can a major war like Vietnam be absorbed into the historical record without listening to those who fought the war, especially when over 200 books have been written by soldiers and their close observers? What are the tacit rules governing ‘legitimate’ knowledge about the war…?”

 

2. Paul Hendrikson’s book The Living and the Dead, an intriguing personal and political biography of McNamara, is an important additional reference here. He discusses the layers of (self)deception and denial which shaped McNamara’s political career and his relationship to the war, and which re-emerged in his 1995 memoir. His devotion to science and mathematics, and its influence on his prosecution of the war, are also traced, along with their slow and partial breakdown as he allowed the human tragedies of the war to affect him.

 

3. See also Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

 

4. See Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815-1830, especially Chapter 5.

 

5. Here I am referring to Lyotard’s idea of the postmodern as both a dialogue of disillusionment with modernity, and existing contemporary with it, rather than being temporised as coming “after” modernism or as synonymous with “late capitalism.” As he writes in The Inhuman,

 

neither modernity nor so-called postmodernity can be identified and defined as clearly circumscribed historical entities, of which the latter would always come "after" the former. Rather... the postmodern is always implied in the modern because of the fact that modernity, modern temporality, comprises in itself an impulsion to exceed itself into a state other than itself. And not only to exceed itself in that way, but to resolve itself into a sort of ultimate stability, such for example as is aimed at by the utopian project, but also by the straightforward political project implied in the grand narratives of emancipation. Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant with its postmodernity. (25)

 

6. My reading of Apocalyse Now tends to cut across, but not necessarily refute, readings which see the film as entirely complicit with the war through its making, its director’s inflated vision, and its technology, which involved the hire of helicopters from the Filipino military and the burning of vast tracts of forest to achieve some shots. Such a reading has been made by Jean Baudrillard, for instance, and I have no essential quarrel with it. I have also noted disturbing complicities in terms of the film’s rhetoric, but also anti-war elements. Rather than seeking to produce a conclusive, homogeneous reading of the film, I have chosen to explore these contradictions and ask what broader cultural symptoms they reflect.

 

7. See Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign And Play In The Discourse Of The Human Sciences” (280).

 

8. Gibson’s book is a particularly insightful and systematic attempt to lay out and critique the mechanistic assumptions which underpinned the American prosecution of the war, and must be a crucial reference for anyone who wishes to explores these elements of U.S. policymaking.

 

9. See Christine Sylvester, “Handmaid’s Tales of American Foreign Policy”; and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism.

 

10. Former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Gareth Evans, for instance, extolled the brilliance of Fukuyama’s thesis in a 1990 speech. Speculating upon its growing realisation in Asia, he cited the moves by the Chinese and Vietnamese toward market economies, the “democratisation” of Taiwan and South Korea, and the growing acceptance among regional leaders of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum. He carefully avoided the questions of democracy in Singapore and Indonesia, and, given his hopes for a U.N. brokered settlement in Cambodia, would no doubt have questioned Fukuyama’s later myopic attitude to the U.N.

 

11. Derrida comments that “[t]here is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language–no syntax and no lexicon–which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (280). A crucial essay here is Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?”

 

12. For a profound presentation of such concerns see Jurgen Habermas’s essays in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, which, while presenting a strongly argued critique of much poststructuralism, shared much with those thinkers’ critiques of Hegelian forms of liberalism and classical marxism.

Works Cited

 

• Bell, Daniel. “The End of American Exceptionalism.” The Public Interest 41 (Fall 1975): 193-224.
• Connolly, Keith. “Apocalypse Now.” Cinema Papers (February-March 1980): 65-66.
• Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Wadsworth, 1960.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign And Play In The Discourse Of The Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278-294.
• During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism Today.” Textual Practice 1.1 (1988): 32-47.
• Evans, Senator Gareth. “Change in Asia and the End of History.” Address to the Asia Society. New York. 27 September 1990.
• Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
• —. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1988.
• —. “What Is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
• Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. London: Penguin, 1992.
• Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.
• Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994.
• Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. London: Polity Press, 1987.
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures On The Philosophy of History. New York: Prometheus Books, 1822.
• Hendrikson, Paul. The Living and the Dead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
• Issacson, Walter. “Kissinger’s Web.” Vanity Fair September 1992: 142-148.
• Johnson, Paul. The Birth of the Modern: World History 1815-1830 London: Orion Books, 1991.
• Kant, Immanuel. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.” On History. Ed. L.W. Beck. Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. 10-24.
• Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Penguin, 1983.
• Lyotard, Jean François. The Inhuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988.
• —. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989.
• —. “The Sign of History.” Poststructuralism and the question of history. Eds. Attridge, Bennington, and Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 161-170.
• McNamara, Robert S. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.
• Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991
• Said, Edward. “Representing the Colonised: Anthropology’s Interlocutors.” Critical Inquiry 15.2: 205-225.
• Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie. New York: Pan-Picador, 1989.
• Sylvester, Christine. “Handmaid’s Tales of American Foreign Policy.” Unpublished paper, 1995.
• Young, Robert. White Mythologies. London: Routledge, 1990.