VIEWSnSTILL IN SAIGON—IN MY MINDnby E. Christian Kopffn ‘he earth outside is covered with snow and I amnJ- covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me ankiller and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veterannappears in a popular song recorded a few years back bynCharlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam Warnis over, but the matter is not settled in my mind, and morenimportantly, in the imagination of the American people.nOfficially, the consensus on the war is nearly complete.n”Everybody knows or else should know” what editorialnwriters and college professors tell their more or less captivenaudiences: the evil of the war, the careless blundering of thenWashington technocratic elite, the glorious victory of thenVietnamese people as the justice of their cause was presentednon television to the American people. Yet in the ragnand bone shop of the heart that provides the themes fornpopular art and entertainment, questions echo and re-echonthat editorial writers do not address: How could such anstrong and wealthy nation lose a war to a small and weaknone? What happened to us in those days? What happenednto our soldiers, the ones who hurried back and the POW’snE. Christian Kopff is professor of classics at the Universitynof Colorado and an editor of Classical Journal.n201 CHRONICLES OF CULTUREnnnwho came later and the MIA’s who never came back?nThe Received Version of the War is a Mdrchen, Jack thenGiant Killer or David and Goliath, with the pleasinglynsimple folkloristic motifs of brave young warrior defeatingnhis bulky, conceited, but vulnerable foe. In this case thengiant’s fall not only restores the promised land to the people,nit is one of many steps on the way to the establishment ofnthe true Messianic kingdom over the entire earth. Despitenits folkloristic roots, no popular art has been built on thenfoundation. This is a fairy tale published in editorial pagesnand college poli. sci. courses and on Public Television.nWhittaker Chambers was able to discern little sense ofntragedy in the American people. As a criticism of thenintellectuals among whom he spent his younger days, theninsight hits the mark. If the state was a tree for the Romanticnpoet, for the 20th century intellectual history is a train,nsubject to delays and strange detours, no doubt, but movingnsteadily towards one far-off secular event. In this inevitable,nmechanical progress, there may be backsliders and therenwill be martyrs, those who die for the cause. But thenTightness of the cause and the inevitability of its triumphsnare assured.nThe American people live in a different sort of fairyntale—the world of Vergil’s Aeneas. Aeneas loves his home,nTroy, and fights to prevent its fall to the brilliant and trickynand ruthless. He moves into the future and Italy, losing wifenand home, to win a new home for his people where, at leastnfor a little while, they can be safe to build and grow again,nuntil they must once more defend themselves againstnviolence and trickery in themselves and from the outside.nHe can never console himself that the losses are not realnlosses but so many Lenin-esque eggs broken for the gloriousnomelette of the future. Italiam non sponte sequor. I am notngoing to Italy because I want to, he tells Dido. The deaths ofnbrave young men represent real and irreparable gaps in thennew state Aeneas is founding.nThe modern intellectual is, like Hazlitt’s lago, a tragicnpoet in real life, who cannot feel the desolation in thendeparture of each individual sacrificed for a future that isnand must remain an abstraction. America’s commitment tonProtestantism and individualism has many negative sides,nbut it does make loss and sacrifice real. Whether he knows itnor not, the typical American has had his mind formed onnthe hero who feels the loss and yet goes on to create. He isnAeneas, and he stands opposed to the martyr of the inevitablenfuture, Che Guevara, say, or Martin Luther King.nAround Vietnam the American popular imagination hasnplayed with themes that involve real loss and real sacrifice.nIt began early. At the height of the war, John Waynen