America After Vietnam
I think a lot of Americans living today don’t know that much about the 1970s, and especially what the mood was like in the country at that time. I was among that generation whose childhoods were colored by two oppressively monolithic events - the defeat in Vietnam, and Richard Nixon’s resignation of the presidency post-Watergate.
It wasn’t a happy period.
I mean, the mood at the time was understandable. America was supposed to be the place of happy endings where the good guys won and the bad guys went to jail. That was the world as my father’s generation understood the world: apple pie, hot rods, Vince Lombardi’s Packers winning another title, Marilyn Monroe’s uncooperative skirt under the subway vent. Nothing ahead but a perpetual red, white, and blue afternoon with hazy edges shaded in bedraggled sepia tones.
America before the Southeast Asian conflict (or war, or invasion, or however you look at it) never took into account the day when we would be the ones sulking with our tails between our legs, defeated by essentially a peasant army in black pajamas wielding second-hand Soviet- and Chinese equipment. The same USA that helped smash Fortress Europe in World War II couldn’t properly dispense with one long jungle trail.
By 1975 (I was six years old, then) it was all over. America pulled out of Saigon in a flurry of helicopters frantically scrambling to bring as many as could travel out of the hands of the advancing North Vietnamese army.
None of this was supposed to happen. But, happen it did.
And it was like this pall settled over the country in those years. The defeat had people pointing fingers at each other, at the soldiers who fought, and at the politicians who’d prosecuted the war. It’s true that Nixon hit the door after a scandal involving burglars busted while casing the Watergate building in DC, but it may as well have been a vengeful judgment by the American people upon Tricky Dick what truly did him in, at least in terms of his presidential legacy. Not that he ever got in any real trouble.
In the end the good guys lost, and the bad guy got off, Scott-free on a helicopter ride of his own.
And then everybody got real bummed out. That was the condition of things culturally until the end of the decade.
