Star Trek and History (17 page)

These were the politics of the broadcast episode, with a final script written by Roddenberry himself.

The
Enterprise
visits Neural, a planet Kirk remembers from an earlier visit as so primitive and peaceful that it seemed like Eden. However, an unequal war has begun on Neural, with one side—known as “the villagers”—mysteriously armed with firearms, devices far beyond the technological level of any society on the planet. The villagers, who represent the official U.S. view of the North Vietnamese, have been attacking and attempting to conquer the peaceful “hill people,” who represent the official U.S. view of the South Vietnamese. Like the National Liberation Front (the Vietcong), the villagers at first seem to be armed with primitive, hand-forged weapons, in this case flintlocks. But these weapons in fact have been mass-produced by some outside imperialist power, which has been smuggling them in and making them appear to be indigenous. Who could this evil empire be? It is the Klingons, of course,
Star Trek
's analog to the Soviet Union. Their aim, needless to say, is to subvert and take over this primitive planet, itself an analog to Vietnam, Indochina, and the rest of the Third World menaced, according to the domino theory, by Communist expansion.

Thus “A Private Little War” promoted the official administration version of the history of the Vietnam War: that it had begun as an intervention by an outside evil empire, the Soviet Union. In fact, as millions of Americans were then discovering, the war had begun as the defense of an existing empire (France) against the historic Vietnamese movement for national independence, and it was transformed into a war of conquest by another nation attempting to advance its own imperial interests in Southeast Asia—the United States of America.

This is not to say that the episode implicitly endorsed a major escalation of the Vietnam War. Indeed, it seems to suggest that the main danger to be avoided is any form of military intervention that could lead to direct warfare between the United States, represented by the Federation, and the evil Communist empire, represented by the Klingons.

The
Enterprise
's options are presented in a debate between Kirk and McCoy. It is revealing that in the teaser, Spock, after issuing a stern warning against interfering in the planet's affairs, is gravely wounded and spends the rest of the episode recovering on the ship, thus conveniently removing him from all further discussion and decision making. Perhaps, as Rick Worland has suggested, Spock's usual role as an objective outside commentator on human affairs “might have made him too dangerous here,” for, being a superrational Vulcan, he might “have perceived instantly the illogic of the whole situation and denounced the Neural/Vietnam War.”
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Before McCoy challenges him, Kirk has decided to provide military training to the hill people and to arm them with the same weapons the villagers possess. McCoy is appalled by this course of action. In a speech loudly evoking Vietnam in the minds of viewers, he foresees the hideous consequences for the people whom the Federation would supposedly be aiding: “You're condemning this whole planet to a war that may never end. It could go on for year after year, massacre after massacre.” Kirk argues that he is merely establishing a balance of power, and he makes the parallel with the Vietnam War explicit:

McCoy:
I don't have a solution. But furnishing them with firearms is certainly
not
the answer!

Kirk:
Bones, do you remember the twentieth-century brush wars on the Asian continent? Two giant powers involved, much like the Klingons and ourselves. Neither side felt that they could pull out?

McCoy:
Yes, I remember—it went on bloody year after bloody year!

Kirk:
But what would you have suggested? That one side arm its friends with an overpowering weapon? Mankind would never have lived to travel space if they had. No—the only solution is what happened, back then, balance of power.

McCoy:
And if the Klingons give their side even more?

Kirk:
Then we arm our side with
exactly
that much more. A balance of power—the trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all—but the only one that preserves both sides!

Kirk here aligns himself closely with the avowed policies of the Johnson administration and suggests that although the road may be long and ugly, a patient application of
realpolitik
will eventually lead out of the Vietnam morass and into humanity's glorious future. At the time, the growing impatience of the American people with a seemingly endless war was producing an increasingly bitter conflict between advocates of total war, such as retired Strategic Air Command chief Curtis LeMay (“bomb North Vietnam back into the Stone Age”) and Ronald Reagan (“pave the country over and put parking stripes on it”), and the already huge peace movement, which was demanding more and more that the United States withdraw from Vietnam and let the Vietnamese settle their own affairs. With the logical Spock absent, McCoy is unable to articulate any coherent alternative to Kirk's analysis and is reduced to mere moral outrage. Kirk's own moral anguish in making his choice precisely mirrors that being projected by Lyndon Johnson, who presented himself as a realistic moderate torn by his rejection of seductive but illusory extremes.

Just like “The City on the Edge of Forever,” “A Private Little War” warns the audience that it must support unpleasant policies in the primitive epoch of the 1960s or the world of the starship
Enterprise
might never come into being. But now that warning is mainly directed not against the doves but the hawks, who could bring about a catastrophe in which “mankind would never have lived to travel space.”

The episode ends with a sense of foreboding and disillusion uncharacteristic of
Star Trek.
When Kirk orders Scotty to manufacture a hundred flintlock weapons for the hill people, Kirk refers to these instruments as “a hundred serpents . . . for the garden of Eden.” Then, as McCoy tries to comfort him, Kirk says somberly, “We're very tired, Mr. Spock. Beam us up home.”

Even as it was being produced, “A Private Little War” was anachronistic in its view of the Vietnam War, referring more clearly to the period of covert U.S. involvement prior to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 than to the open U.S. war of 1968. Kirk even points out early in the episode that “keeping our presence here secret is an enormous tactical advantage” over the Klingons. The leader of the hill people has a wife obviously modeled on President Diem's wife, Madame Nhu, the infamous “dragon lady,” and the fictional wicked woman, like her model in Saigon, helps precipitate an event that triggers escalation by the good outside power. In late 1967 and the first month of 1968, despite all official and media reassurances, Kirk's policy of measured escalation had certainly not led to any resolution, and McCoy's warnings about “a war that may never end” could not be easily dismissed.

Nevertheless, “A Private Little War,” like “The City on the Edge of Forever,” suggests that the Vietnam War is an ugly necessity that forms part of the pathway to the glorious twenty-third century in which the adventures of
Star Trek
take place. But two days before the episode aired, an event began that was to challenge even such guarded optimism.

Although “A Private Little War” was produced while the government and the media were proclaiming that the United States was nearing victory, it was not completed and telecast until February 2, 1968, and the situation had now changed dramatically. The nation was in shock from the start on January 31 of the devastating Tet Offensive, when the insurgent forces simultaneously attacked almost every U.S. base and over a hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam. When the next episode directly relevant to Vietnam was broadcast just one month later, it fit perfectly with America's post-Tet consciousness. Completed in December 1967, while antiwar newspapers were debunking official optimism with accounts of the rapidly deteriorating U.S. military situation, this episode shows that the makers of
Star Trek
had themselves become part of the antiwar movement they had originally warned against in 1966. Sardonically titled “The Omega Glory,” it displayed a profound darkening of
Star Trek
's vision of the Vietnam War and its possible outcome.

By the time “The Omega Glory” aired on March 1, 1968, the Tet Offensive had shattered any expectations of victory in Vietnam. The episode, written by Gene Roddenberry, examined the consequences of a possibly endless war in Vietnam from a perspective much closer to the grim view that McCoy had expressed in “A Private Little War.” Indeed, the main victims of such a war are no longer seen as some alien peoples confined to some remote location like the planet Neural or Southeast Asia, for America itself is imagined as a devastated former civilization reduced to barbarism.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy visit the planet Omega IV, whose dreadful history is gradually revealed to them. The planet is now dominated by a race of Asian villagers known as “the Kohms,” who are engaged in unending warfare against a fair-haired, fair-skinned race of savages known as “the Yangs.” The Yangs, who are so primitive they seem scarcely human, are beginning to overwhelm the Kohms with the sheer ferocity of their hordes. Meanwhile, starship captain Tracey, a mad renegade, has violated the Prime Directive, directly intervening in the planet's war on the side of the Kohms, personally using his phasers to slaughter many hundreds of Yangs.

McCoy's medical research reveals that once there had been very advanced civilizations here, but they had destroyed themselves in this constant warfare. The survivors show signs that they had even waged “bacteriological warfare,” similar to Earth's “experiments in the 1990s”; “Hard to believe,” he says, “we were once foolish enough to play around with that.” Spock's logic ultimately concludes that this planet presents a case of parallel evolution: “They fought the war your Earth avoided, and in this case the Asiatics won and took over the planet.” He comes to this conclusion as soon as he and Kirk realize the significance of the names of the two warring races:

Kirk:
Yangs? Yanks. Yankees!

Spock:
Kohms. Communists!

At this point, the Yangs, who have conquered the Kohm village, are about to execute Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. The scene is dramatically punctuated by the entrance of the sacred banner of the Yangs, a tattered American flag, evidently the “omega glory” of the episode's title. Forgetting all the principles for which they were fighting in their endless war against the Communists, these Yankees have become savage barbarians teetering on the very edge of bestiality. All they have left of the great American ideals are their worship words—garbled versions of the Pledge of Allegiance and the preamble to the Constitution of the United States—which they recite as mere sacred gibberish.

In a melodramatic ending, Kirk grabs their holiest of holies, a printed version of the preamble to the Constitution, and recites it, with emphasis on “We the People.” He explains to the Yangs, who now worship Kirk as a god because of the seemingly miraculous appearance of a rescue team from the
Enterprise
, that “these words . . . were not written only for the Yangs, but for the Kohms as well.” Such thoughts constitute a shocking heresy for the Yangs, but Kirk insists, “They must apply to everyone, or they mean nothing.” The eyes of the Yangs gradually seem more human as Kirk thus awakens them from their eons of mindless anti-Communist warfare, and the thrilling sight of Old Glory and strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner” suggest that this planet, too, may return to the true path of American ideals.

“The Omega Glory” implies that the war in Southeast Asia, which no longer held any promise of victory or even a suggestion of an end, could evolve into an interminable, mutually destructive conflict between the “Yankees” and the “Communists” capable of destroying civilization and humanity. True Americanism is shown as antithetical to mindless militarism and anti-Communism, and the episode rather paradoxically uses ultrapatriotic images of a tattered Old Glory and strains of the “Star-Spangled Banner” to preach a message of globalism. Kirk's emphasis on “We the People” might even be a suggestion to the American people that they must reassert their own role in the nation's affairs.

If there were any doubts where the makers of
Star Trek
now stood on the Vietnam War itself, these were resolved in the pages of the nation's leading science fiction magazines. Like other Americans, science fiction writers were profoundly and bitterly divided about the Vietnam War, and in early 1968 more than 150 of them took out rival advertisements supporting or opposing the continuation of the conflict.
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These ads, signed before the Tet Offensive, appeared first in the March issue of the
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, which came out just before “The Omega Glory.” Not one person associated with
Star Trek
joined the seventy-two signers of the ad that stated “We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.” Among the eighty-two who signed the ad that stated “We oppose the participation of the United States in the war in Vietnam” were
Star Trek
scriptwriters Jerome Bixby, Jerry Sohl, Harlan Ellison, and Norman Spinrad, as well as Gene Roddenberry himself.

The year 1968 was not only the decisive moment in the Vietnam War but also the period of the most intense domestic crisis in recent American history. Most of the countryside of South Vietnam was won by the insurgents, and the 1.4 million troops under U.S. command were locked into a defensive posture around their bases and the cities and towns of the south. General William Westmoreland was dismissed from his command. The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was forced to give up his quest to be reelected, and antiwar forces swept every Democratic primary. Tens of thousands of troops and almost all urban police forces had to be mobilized to put down the fierce uprisings in 125 American cities the week after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Washington itself had to be defended by combat troops, while columns of black smoke from burning buildings rose all around the Capitol, overshadowing it. Police and sometimes soldiers battled demonstrators on college campuses across the country. The international finance system reeled from blows to the U.S. economy and its credibility, and the Johnson administration was forced into negotiations. Robert Kennedy, running as an antiwar candidate for president, was assassinated on the evening when he had seemingly clinched the Democratic nomination. Twenty-five thousand soldiers, police, and Secret Service agents battled antiwar demonstrators outside the Democratic convention in August.