IN ONE OF KAFKA's short stories, an explorer arrives in a small, poor, and remote country, garrisoned by soldiers who wear uniforms that are much too hot but that serve as reminders of a faraway home. The ruler of this country has invented an ingenious method of punishment, a sort of harrow that cuts the text of a broken law into the lawbreaker's flesh. The script is so intricate that it takes a full twelve hours before the lawbreaker is dead.

Because the script is so very intricate, it seems, it is difficult for outside observers like the explorer to understand. In fact, the aging, sentimental officer who operates the harrow tells the explorer, only the lawbreaker himself can be said to have no trouble with the script--and this even if, as often happens, he is a person of little education. "It is not easy to decipher the writing with the eye," the officer explains, patiently. "But our man deciphers it with his wounds."

For over 12 years, now, most Americans have shared the difficulties of the explorer--watching, at first passively and then with mounting disapproval, first passively and then with mounting disapproval, as officers who appealed to their sense of justice and tradition inflicted prolonged punishment on people from a distant country. For the precise correctness of Kafka's officer there was the clinical detachment of various Rostows and Kissingers. For the mechanical sharpness of the harrow there were the exploding blades of the latest anti-personnel bombs. And though the Vietnamese refused to play the part of Kafka's passive lawbreaker, they, too--even in the act of fighting back--could decipher their suffering's meaning, if violence on such a scale can be said to have a hidden meaning, with their wounds.

Now that the story is building towards its ending--the gap between American and Vietnamese experiences of the Vietnam war, and the American antiwar movement's failure to bridge the gap, seem clearer than ever before. Congress may flatly refuse President Ford the unqualified authority and unlimited funds that it awarded his predecessors and that he needs to continue the war. But Congress's new willingness to refuse--if it doesn't crumble under pressure, as several key representatives already have--will depend less on leftists' and liberals' imagination of mechanized warfare than on liberals' and conservatives' unwillingness so he bothered with such things at all, on their new acceptance in theory of horrors like those they helped inflict in practice.

"I guess a lot of them are going to die." Vice-president Rockefeller said recently, for example, when reporters asked him what the coming weeks were likely to hold for the latest batch of Vietnamese refugees. Rockefeller's reply was a little disingenuous, since as he spoke the Vietnamese army and air force his government maintained were creating more refugees, by carrying out a scorched-earth headlong flight and bombing such Provisional Revolutionary Government-held towns as Ban Me Thuot. Even if this had not been so. Rockefeller's stoicism before the refugees' supposedly impending deaths bespoke no sudden access of compassion for the Vietnamese people. But it was still as close as any vice-president had come to accepting American non-intervention in Vietnam since Vice-president Nixon argued for dropping some nuclear bombs to help the French.

AS ROCKEFELLER, continuing to speak of a North Vietnamese-caused bloodbath, prepared to accept the end of the American-caused bloodbath he had consistently supported, moderately dovish liberals like The New York Times or the self-styled presidential contender Morris Udall insisted that any attempt by President Ford to make the Vietnam war a political issue was unwise, immoral, and doomed to failure. More principled opponents of the war--Times columnist Anthony Lewis, for example--joined in insisting that the United States should concentrate not on attaching blame for past mistakes in Vietnam, but on administering future, non-political aid. In Congress, liberals spoke against military aid on humanitarian as well as pragmatic grounds--but their speeches were printed only in the Congressional Record. In more public forums, it was taken for granted that discussion of Vietnam would focus on America's lack of success in achieving its purposes, that the only issue related to Vietnam worthy or susceptible of discussion in the 1976 election was the familiar-standing question of Who Lost It. And if such discussion seemed unlikely to be taken seriously--as poll after poll showed overwhelming American majorities opposed to further military aid to Indochina--it seemed likely that that was because Americans were sick of the whole subject, and convinced that they themselves had little stake in what happened so far away.

This was testimony to the limited success of an antiwar movement that had increasingly insisted that American activities in Indochina called in question the whole political scaffolding on which they rested. And it was still more telling that the most important political figure still obviously concerned with what happened in Vietnam--as opposed to what happened in the United States--was President Ford, visibly moved by the influx of Vietnamese orphans and bewailing his lack of legal authority to continue bombing their country.

Dean Rusk, convinced that his and his colleagues' attitudes towards Indochina had been essentially correct all along, lamented this month humanitarian attitudes toward Vietnam in a series of lectures on the difficulties of foreign policy.

"The common people of any country always prefer peace to war." Rusk told his Lehigh University audience resignedly, "but in a democracy that view wells up and sends out signals all over the world." Rusk was right--if the American people brought their government to end the war, finally, they acted less out of any profound consideration of conflicting world forces or the principles of American ideology than because the common people of any country always prefer peace.

But as long as not common people but people like Rusk ran their government, people who just trusted in it because they loved their country and weren't very interested in politics were likely to find themselves traveling in strange, hostile, bewildering countries, like Kafka's explorer. As the orphans poured in, and word began to spread that even the Saigon government's own troops might turn against withdrawing American troops, 'populist' papers like The Chicago Tribune began to thunder about incomprehensible Vietnamese ingratitude.

THIRTY YEARS AGO, another American army was entering France, and French Resistance fighters, anticipating the advancing American troops, began to drive out an occupying German army. In the small French village where Gertrude Stein had spent the war, the German officers couldn't understand what was happening. The German captain promised to come back in a few months, as a tourist--even though it was clear how the war would end. German planes were still bombing Resistance-held villages--and he cried when he said goodbye, expecting his French chauffeur to sympathize with him. Stein was deliriously happy--proud of the American liberators and amused by the retreating Germans. "They are a funny people, they certainly are," she said.