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Times of London
Review: Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
Max Hastings makes an impressive case for why US action in
Vietnam was doomed from the start, says Gerard DeGroot
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975
Gerard DeGroot
There once was a time when the US was blessed with leaders of
exceptional intelligence and ability. John Kennedy’s cabinet was
justifiably called “the best and the brightest”. Yet genius was no
impediment to idiocy. Those brilliant men took America into an
unnecessary war that devastated the nation. More than 40 years later the
pain of Vietnam still corrodes. What causes great men to fail so
remarkably? Their “egregious error”, argues Max Hastings, “was not that
of lying to the world, but rather that of lying to themselves”. They
were led astray by their boundless belief in American possibility.
Hastings is perfectly suited to write about the Vietnam War. He
witnessed its peculiar tragedies at first hand, arriving in Saigon in
1971 as a reporter at the age of 24. It’s fitting that a journalist
should chronicle this war, since journalists played such a prominent
part. The fact that Hastings is British is an additional advantage,
since American writers are often blinded by their insularity. The
politically conservative Hastings is also immune to the liberal
fantasies that frequently cloud understanding. His condemnation of
American action is all the more convincing because it is not politically
motivated. As he writes: “Only simpletons of the political right and
left dare to suggest that in Vietnam either side possessed a monopoly of
virtue”.
Unfortunately, over the years, those simpletons have dominated debate,
with the result that judgment has been polarised and nuance eradicated.
American conduct is seen as good or evil; the Vietnamese communists as
virtuous or malevolent. For instance, the left has idolised the
avuncular Ho Chi Minh — that kindly face suggesting a gentle soul. Yet
Ho was the leader of an undeniably terrorist movement. His National
Liberation Front carried out 36,000 assassinations during the struggle.
NLF doctrine held that it was “better that a possible innocent dies than
that a guilty man escapes”. Guilt, however, was loosely defined. Death
squads targeted landlords, but often killed peasants whose plots of land
were slightly larger than that of their jealous neighbours. These
“enemies of the people” were often buried alive.
The revolution was fuelled by fear more than love. The question then
arises: why did peasants support such a cruel movement? Partly because
the communists promised land and land was everything. As Hastings
writes: “Such was the poverty of rural Vietnam that a man with a primary
school certificate was respected as an ‘intellectual’. Some couples
owned only a single pair of trousers, which husband and wife took turns
to wear.” A small plot of land meant survival, but was also a sacred
connection to ancestors.
Impoverished peasants associated the Saigon government with those who
took their land or stole their crops. However much the South Vietnamese
might have hated the communists, most of them hated their government
even more. This was the fatal flaw of American policy: they sided with a
regime that could never win the support of its people. Americans
believed in the noble cause of fighting communism, but to the Vietnamese
peasants they seemed like neo-colonialist bullies who bolstered a cruel
regime in Saigon. Peasants named their dogs after Lyndon B Johnson
(they’re not fond of dogs). The name Nixon was used to frighten
children, as if he were a monster from a fairytale.
The Americans never stopped to consider what
the Vietnamese wanted. “The only thing they told us . . . was
that they were gooks,” a GI reflected. “They were to be killed. Nobody
sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background.
They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill.” Graham Greene witnessed this
dangerous myopia as early as 1955. In Greene’s novel The Quiet American,
the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler perfectly describes the
hopelessly naive American official Alden Pyle: “I never knew a man who
had better motives for all the trouble he caused . . . [he was]
impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance.” As
Hastings says of LBJ: he was determined to assist the Vietnamese people
“in spite of themselves”. Americans know best.
That failure to understand the social context
rendered military strategy immaterial. Stated simply, by virtue
of being on the wrong side, the American war effort was doomed from the
start. Unable to accept this inevitability, armchair strategists have
spent the past 40 years devising alternative plans that would surely
have brought victory — more bombing, more troops, different tactics, and
so on. Hastings rightly condemns this “strategic
illiteracy”. In the cruel arithmetic of counter-terrorism, every
effort to destroy an insurgent simply created more insurgents. Napalm
radicalises even more effectively than does communist ideology.
“This was a Groundhog Day conflict,” writes Hastings, “in which contests
for a portion of elephant grass, jungle or rice paddy were repeated not
month after month, but year after year . . . All that changed were the
names and numbers of those who sweated, feared, fought, died.” The
Americans were finally defeated by time’s inevitability — they could not
stay in Vietnam for ever. “How long do you Americans want to fight?” the
North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong once asked a journalist from The
New York Times. “One year? Two years? Three years? Five Years? Ten
Years? Twenty years? We shall be glad to accommodate you.”
The passage of time was measured by the steady degradation of the
American army. By 1971 60 per cent of American soldiers used marijuana
regularly (or “Buddha grass” as it was known in the bars), another 22
per cent used heroin. Troops were murdering their officers. As one
general reflected: “We went into Vietnam with a great army, and finished
with a terrible one.”
While the reasons for the American defeat are simple, the process was
complex. That complexity deserves careful illumination. This is a long
book but not a bloated one; this war demands the detail that Hastings
provides. His basic arguments are not particularly new, but the book
itself is still original. What makes it so magnificent is its intimacy.
Hastings possesses the journalist’s instinct for a good story, the tiny
anecdote that exposes a big truth. Large tragedies are illustrated
through very personal pain.
Along the way Hastings demolishes some enduring myths of this war: black
and Hispanic soldiers did not die disproportionately; anti-war
protesters did not bring the war to an end; Kennedy, had he lived, would
not have withdrawn. One by one, the sacred canons of right and left are
obliterated. The war is laid bare, with all its uncomfortable truths
exposed.
“Every military fact is a social and political fact,” wrote Antonio
Gramsci. The Americans never understood that principle; the Vietnamese
lived by it. This explains why soldiers who made grenades from Coke cans
could defeat a formidable American army. “The war didn’t make any sense
any more,” a frustrated GI remarked in 1971. In truth, it never did.
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 by Max Hastings, William Collins,
722pp; £30 |