The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
His son and namesake, who served as a colonel in Vietnam, would have seen equally baffled by, say, John Lennon's plea to give peace a chance. George S. Patton III once observed American soldiers praying during a lull in that war. "They looked determined and reverent at the same time. But still," he reassured an interviewer, "they're a bloody good bunch of killers." [37] That military intervention in Indochina has been analyzed and meditated upon in many ways. But by now it is a commonplace that the Western interlopers did not have much awareness of the fabric of Vietnamese society, and made scarcely any effort to fathom its culture.
Perhaps it was impenetrable, since it would have been exceptionally puzzling to many Americans. As Frances Fitzgerald noted during that conflict, "for traditional Vietnamese the sense of limitation and enclosure was as much a part of individual life as of the life of the nation." Enormous wealth was historically derided as "antisocial, not a sign of success but a sign of selfishness." She added that "traditional Vietnamese law rested not upon the notion of individual rights, but the notion of duties," and that not even the Vietnamese language included a "word that exactly corresponds to the Western personal pronoun .... The traditional Vietnamese did not see himself as a totally independent being, for he did not distinguish himself as acutely as does a Westerner from his society." [38] Consider the contrast with General Douglas MacArthur, who had vowed in February, 1942, after the Japanese victory in the Philippines had driven him to Australia: "I shall return." The War Department tried to persuade MacArthur to alter the resonant statement to "We shall return," but failed in its suggestion that he might need help. That history can be personalized, that self-made men are both conceivable and heroic, were notions foreign to trans-Pacific values. Within three decades of MacArthur's defeat and return, tragic folly would result from the American clash with an Asian culture; and Vietnamese ideals sanctioned the ability to resist and withstand terrible pressure more than the ability to conquer. The American defeat in Vietnam is a reminder of how pronounced national differences can be, and how much those differences can matter.
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University. He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).