U.S. military zeal is a fantasy

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft

LONDON: No historical themes are more fashionable at present than invented tradition and the uses of memory. One historian who has just given them new meaning is Joseph Ellis, professor at Mount Holyoke, a women's college in Massachusetts, and author of the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers.

For years past the Ellis, 57, has talked about his days as an officer with the American airborne forces in Vietnam 35 years ago. He returned thence, he said, to Yale where he took part in the peace movement -- a touching story which increased his popularity with his students. The only trouble was, the story was quite false. At the time he claimed to have been slogging through the paddy fields he was actually in graduate school, and his army service consisted of three grueling years' teaching at West Point.

Inventing a past is not unknown among writers (or journalists), and it's possible to feel for Ellis in his unmasking and humiliation. But what really makes his case so interesting is the way he epitomizes his countrymen. It is not one man but a nation which is pretending. The real invented tradition is American military zeal and glory.

To say that might seem perverse at a time when the Americans are more than ever obsessed with past wars. Saving Private Ryan and now Pearl Harbor were heavily promoted, following any number of Vietnam movies. Books about World War II like The Greatest Generation and Flags of Our Fathers crowd out the bestseller lists. The huge Vietnam memorial in Washington will soon be joined by a still vaster WW II memorial (oddly -- or maybe significantly -- enough, it is being commissioned almost 60 years after the United States entered the war).

In view of all that, it will seem as startling to say this to patriotic American conservatives as to European leftists who hate American militarism. But the fact is that the United States is a deeply unwarlike country, the Americans do not like fighting wars and the Americans had little experience of warfare in the 20th century.

They had little experience, that is, in the all-important terms of casualties. In the past century, 1 million British servicemen were killed, nearly 2 million Frenchmen, more than 5 million Germans, and too many millions of Russians to count accurately. And in all those wars together -- first and second world wars, Korea and Vietnam -- fewer than 400,000 Americans were killed, out of a much larger population. To put it another way, since 1900, five times more Americans have been killed in road accidents than in battle.

Europe really is suffused in the blood of terrible conflicts, self-inflicted and futile as they too often were. Thursday's Guardian showed a harrowing photograph, a danse macabre of skeletons which is the newly discovered grave of 20 men of the Lincolnshires killed at Arras in 1917, among tens of thousands killed in that one battle. More men were killed at a battle like Passchendaele alone than all the Americans who died in Vietnam; almost twice as many British soldiers were killed in four years on the western front as all the Americans killed in all the wars of the 20th century.

In the quarter-century since Vietnam, something very strange has happened. While the Americans have remained technically the only superpower on earth, they have quietly decided not to fight any more, other than bombarding Iraq and Serbia from the air. And yet at the same time, they have grown more and more absorbed in memories of warfare, embroidered and exaggerated as if by way of compensation.

This was personified (before the Ellis affair) by Ronald Reagan, a man who acted in countless gung-ho flag-wavers and then borrowed their martial rhetoric for his political career, but who once went to remarkable lengths to avoid military service himself.

Today we see a United States which possesses overwhelming force, but whose foremost military doctrine is that, whatever else happens, there must be no American casualties. In 1992, an elite force was sent into Somalia, and pulled out as soon as 18 American soldiers had been killed.

American troops in the Balkans have observed the "no-risk policy" so successfully that, as one reporter drily records, there have been no American casualties at all in Bosnia apart from accidents and suicides. "Son of Star Wars" is itself a symptom of this trepidity, a far-fetched attempt to protect America forever.

For educated Americans like Joseph Ellis, Vietnam is a special hang-up. I am an Englishman of exactly the Vietnam generation, a couple of years younger than Ellis; indeed, for reasons too complicated to explain here, I was nearly drafted into the U.S. army in 1965. I know many Americans of my own age and, as much to the point, my own class -- journalists, publishers, lawyers. And I don't think I know one who served in Vietnam.

Fifty-something-plus Americans can reply that they saw no reason to fight in a war which they didn't support, which seems fair enough. But they are haunted by the knowledge that others did fight in it, poor whites and blacks chosen by a peculiarly unfair system of selective service.

Another startling fact which explains a good deal about American life to this day is that no Harvard man died in Vietnam. Nor, I believe, did any son of a president, vice-president or cabinet secretary. This hang-up lay behind the way a predominantly liberal Washington press corps fell head over heels in love a year ago with Senator John McCain, a man with a flawlessly illiberal record but who had, unlike almost all of those media men, suffered for his country.

And it also lies behind Joseph Ellis's poignant attempt to conjure up a doubly admirable past for himself, as a man who first fought for the home of the brave and then didn't study war no more. If it's any comfort to him, he is a true American.

-- Guardian News Service