“You’re condemning this whole planet to a war that may never end,” Dr. Leonard McCoy chastised Captain James T. Kirk, in the 1968 Star Trek episode “A Private Little War.” “It could go on for year after year, massacre after massacre.” Broadcast twice in the science-fiction series’ second season, “A Private Little War” is one of Star Trek’s four explicit allegories on the Cold War logic driving American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Star Trek ran from 1966 to 1969, and like Rod Serling’s pioneering work on the Twilight Zone, creator Gene Roddenberry often incorporated contemporary, socially conscious parables into fantastical situations. The show’s run coincided with Vietnam’s most intense years, and Star Trek was among television’s first primetime shows to address the war, even indirectly. The first two allegories – “The City on the Edge of Tomorrow” and “A Private Little War” – are hawkish while the final two – “The Omega Glory” and “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” – are self-consciously anti-war, echoing America’s changing attitudes. Even in episodes without obvious Vietnam overtones, Kirk’s certainty when facing conflict on distant planets, in contrast to Spock’s ambivalence over the logic of war, reflect arguments within President Lyndon Johnson’s administration and nation at large.
“A Private Little War,” which aired on February 2, 1968, just days after the Tet Offensive began, is the most thought-provoking. On the primitive planet Neural (Vietnam), the starship Enterprise crew (obviously America) finds the Klingons (clearly the Soviet Union) stirring up trouble by arming “the villagers” (North Vietnamese) in their war of conquest against the peaceful “hill people” (South Vietnamese). The Klingons hope to draw Neural into its sphere of influence by supplying weapons – which although simple flintlock rifles – are far superior to any indigenous technology and will decisively alter the conflict’s outcome.
Captain Kirk is caught on the horns of a universal dilemma: obey the Prime Directive of noninterference, effectively ceding Neural to the slavery of Klingon authoritarianism, or arm the hill people with comparable weapons for a fight that will ultimately destroy their world for the sake of maintaining an intergalactic balance of power. Just like the U.S. in Southeast Asia, Kirk seeks to do the right thing in a situation, without a satisfactory course of action.
“I don’t have a solution,” McCoy acknowledges. “But furnishing them with firearms is certainly not the answer!”
“Bones,” Kirk retorts, “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?
“Yes, I remember – it went on bloody year after bloody year!”
“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.”
“And if the Klingons give their side even more?”
“Then we arm our side with exactly that much more.” Kirk decides. “A balance of power – the trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all – but the only one that preserves both sides.”
Having finally made the unsettling moral choice to intervene, Kirk and McCoy’s disillusionment in the final scene of “A Private Little War”– reflecting American weariness at the onset of Tet – is strikingly uncharacteristic of Star Trek. “We’re very tired, Mister Spock. Beam us up home.”
