Stiffed by Susan Faludi

Author:Susan Faludi [Faludi, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-203825-8
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1999-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

7

THE CREATURE IN THE MIRROR

The Fantasy Cavalry to the Rescue

ONLY FIVE YEARS AFTER THE FALL of Saigon, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan declared in a campaign speech, “For too long, we have lived with the ‘Vietnam Syndrome.’ “ His words and his subsequent election were advertisements that the war memory had been canceled, to be replaced with a feel-good celluloid alternative. “It is time that we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. A small country, newly free from colonial rule, sought our help in establishing self-rule and the means of self-defense against a totalitarian neighbor bent on conquest.… We dishonor the memory of fifty thousand young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful.”1

Vietnam had often seemed like a movie while it was happening—"war as performance,” as historian Marilyn Young has called it.2 Its body counts were media-managed by the Pentagon, its audience glued to the nightly news, its ultimate disaster often attributed to a hostile press corps. Finally, years after it was over, Americans received the cinematic resolution that the actual war had denied them. Instead of honoring the dead by grappling with the war’s true lessons, Americans chose to apply the balm of movie magic. If war overseas was already long lost, a battle continued over what sort of damage it had wreaked on American masculinity, the violence done to men’s sense of mission, confidence, even virtue. The nation sought a fantasy to redeem its manhood, and it would find no better ringmaster than the great fabulist himself, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s combat conjurings predated Vietnam. He remembered vividly and recounted unashamedly battle scenes from World War II, even though he had never left the environs of Hollywood during the war years. Declared ineligible for combat, he spent the war narrating flyboy training films and appearing in a few of them like Rear Gunner and For God and Country. Later, he recalled how his “service” (in the Army Air Corps First Motion Picture Unit in Hollywood) had ripped him from home and hearth. “By the time I got out of the Army Air Corps,” mused the man whose battlefield grime had all been applied by makeup artists, “all I wanted to do—in common with several million other veterans—was to rest up awhile, make love to my wife, and come up refreshed to a better job in an ideal world.”3

For the rest of his life, he imagined scenes from the war he never fought as if they were his own. Such sentimental memories—the gunner dying in the arms of his pilot as his B-17 crashed, the black sailor on KP duty who integrated the navy by manning a machine gun at Pearl Harbor—were all screenplay memories. He horrified many when, in a 1983 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, he suggested that he had actually photographed the liberation of Nazi death camps as a member of the Signal Corps, and even kept a copy of the film.

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