A Very Personal View

GLORIA EMERSON'S Winners and Losers has not, on the whole, received very good reviews. Amost without exception, critics have said that her book--a collection of interviews and reminiscences about the war in Indochina--is confused, poorly written, and above all too personal. A Saigon correspondent for The New York Times from 1970 to 1972, Emerson drops any pretense to objectivity in Winners and Losers, concentrating instead on how the war affected her and other individuals. As a result, the critics have generally agreed with Garry Wills, who wrote disapprovingly in The New York Review of Books that "It is all a little too obviously Ms. Emerson's war," and discarded the book as "ineffectual protest."

But perhaps there is room for books about the war that are completely personal, that concentrate on the individual's reactions. One of the most horrifying aspects of the Vietnam war was its denial of humanity: death came from the sky, unpredictably and indiscriminately, or in the forest, at night and without warning. The enemy never took human form. American soldiers generally were ignorant of the historical roots of both the war they were fighting and the society they were invading. And on this side of the ocean, it took almost a decade of American involvement in Vietnam for the public to realize the injustice we were perpetrating in Southeast Asia. It was not until the draft began to reach into middle-class homes that the war became a major political issue here, and when the draft ended, so did the public outcry against the bombing in Vietnam.

Early in the book, Emerson quotes Nguyen Ngoc Luong, her Vietnamese interpreter, who wrote to her after she left, "There is an acute lack of forgetfulness in you about Vietnam." Much later in the book, she responds: "Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know."

It is these lessons, painful and ineradicable, that Emerson tries to transmit in Winners and Losers. Her approach is typical of a reporter: she spent years interviewing dozens of Vietnam veterans and their families, dozens of antiwar workers, members of the foreign policy establishment that supported the war, and as many Vietnamese as she could. Her book has been criticized bacause the majority of the people she describes are American, but Emerson explains early on that she, like so many other foreign correspondents, found it difficult to contact North Vietnamese or South Vietnamese freedom fighters. And since the liberation of Saigon, very few Americans have been allowed to visit Vietnam, so it's hard to see how Emerson could include descriptions of the after-effects of the war there.

Yet it is those interviews, tucked in among her recollections of the American presence in Vietnam, when Emerson describes a meeting with a North Vietnamese diplomat in Paris, or a Vietnamese soldier, that form the most moving parts of the book. These people, and others like Don Luce, the American reporter who revealed the existence of Saigon's tiger cages, or an American deserter on his way to Sweden, struggled to bring an end to the war. They are the heroes in a book dominated by sadder characters, American veterans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by death or mutilation, and by Emerson herself--people whose lives will never return to normalcy.

Throughout the book, Emerson is driven by a missionary's fury at the thought that Americans have done their best to forget Vietnam and to relegate to the status of a mistake a war that lasted more than a decade, cost more than a million civilian South Vietnamese lives, generated more than ten million South Vietnamese refugees, left the Vietnamese countryside pockmarked with craters, and cost the lives of 50,000 American soldiers. A former CIA agent Emerson knew in Vietnam who lives now in New York told her, "It bores me, it's ancient history," adding, as he turned back to watch a T.V. football game, "I don't want to remember." An eighth grade history text has only a few paragraphs on the war. Apparently, it is easier for Americans to forget the country was ever involved in an ugly war than it is to live with the guilt. Angrily, Emerson writes, "It is important to remember, to spell the names correctly, to know the provinces, before we are persuaded that none of it happened, that none of us were in such places."

WINNEPS AND LOSERS is a book for those Americans, like the CIA agent, who have tried to forget. When Emerson first visited Saigon in 1956, when Vietnam was still a French colony, the streets were quiet, lined with trees and women in silk and parasols. When she returned there in 1970, Saigon had become a city of refugees and prostitutes catering to the American army. Vietnam needs no reminders of the American experience in Indochina. But America, apparently, does, and the detailed portraits of individuals Emerson gives us are far more moving than statistics could be. It is the small things about the war, the minor tragedies, that hurt. Emerson calls one section of the book "Odd things not yet forgotten," but the phrase could be the title of the book as a whole, a collection of small incidents that should be remembered.

Emerson is struggling against something deeper than other people's forgetfulness, however. She is herself trapped by her inability to move beyond the war, and at points in Winners and Losers her tone becomes a little holier-than-thou when she writes of her own anguish. The book is an effort to exorcise her own memories, as well as an effort to jog those of other people; to this extent, Wills's comment is a fair one. But the book she has written is not, as Wills suggests, ineffectual protest; it is a powerful reminder of the agony caused by a senseless war that dragged on and on because no one would admit to making the initial mistake. So its personal tone may be one of the major elements of the book's power: Emerson is herself an example of the phenomenon she is describing, an odd thing not yet forgotten, someone whose life will never be the same. The war's effect on her--a complete revision of her view of her country--may be indelible.

Winners and Losers is not perfect, of course. At times the detail grows tedious and redundant, at times Emerson's fervor obscures the gray areas in between those who have lost and those who have won by the war. She makes no effort to analyze the causes of the war in Vietnam; that is not her mission. Her goal is that of a reporter, to describe what has happened, and she makes little attempt to move beyond that limited role. In some ways that omission is unfortunate: the reader is left curious about the meaning of Emerson's experience about just what it is that she expects people to remember. The horror of it she presents clearly. The reasons the Vietnam war is a more horrible episode than other colonial wars, than, say, Korea, is less clear. The lessons are left vague. Perhaps that vagueness, that inability to resolve in her own mind the meaning of her experience, gives a hint to the causes of Emerson's anguish, but it doesn't help the reader understand how to avoid future Vietnams.

Perhaps Emerson's final point in Winners and Losers is that very few winners at all emerged from the war in Indochina. One of the veterans she talks to suggests that if there are any, they certainly aren't the people who fought on either side in Vietnam. And for everyone else, it is easier to forget the war ever happened than it is to worry about veterans' rights or about amnesty for draft resisters or people with less than honorable discharges or about reparation payments to Vietnam. In a time when America seems to be trying hard to leave Vietnam forever, Emerson is probably right: it is important to remember, to spell the names correctly, to know the provinces, before we are persuaded that none of it happened, that none of us were in such places.