PAUL F. BRAIM
The recent publication of an apologium, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, by former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, has renewed the verbal barrages over Vietnam, bringing to the surface again emotions that have never entirely subsided. McNamara's thesis is that prosecution of the limited war in Vietnam by the leadership of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations was "wrong, terribly wrong," and "we owe it to future generations to explain why" the decisions on the war were made. McNamara is correct on two counts: "Incremental Escalation" was a terribly inadequate strategy, and yes, we should learn from this war.
Certainly McNamara shoulders a significant part of the blame for our failure in Vietnam. This memoir, after a self-congratulatory summary of McNamara's rise to national prominence, centers on his participation in directing the war in Vietnam--on the proposals, discussions, arguments, and decisions that initiated and escalated US military support of the Republic of Vietnam. McNamara describes well the activism and naïveté of the Kennedy Administration as it launched a crusade to establish a democratic nation in Vietnam, in part to offset earlier failures in international affairs. During the Johnson Administration, McNamara and his associates became more professional in their handling of the war, but they were constrained by a President who gave greater priority to the domestic "War on Poverty" than to the real war in Vietnam. The author makes the cogent point that the crowding of multiple crises into the daily workload of the cabinet officers often made their recommendations on Vietnam palliative rather than proactive. He describes candidly his leadership in the buildup, his doubts about the commitment as early as 1965, and his conclusion by 1967 that the United States should withdraw. As to why he did not act on his convictions, McNamara responds that he was a team player, making the best of the decisions of Presidents who were trying to achieve victory.
These intimate details--the personal McNamara notes heretofore unavailable to researchers--constitute a valuable addition to the historical record of this conflict. The author deserves credit for providing this memoir (although hardly the encomium provided by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on the dust jacket). He is certainly "bright" enough to have known that he would draw more criticism than praise for this book, and reviews from both the political left and right have been sharply critical.
McNamara says he failed, and he convinces this reviewer, whose four tours of duty in Vietnam made convincing him rather easy. McNamara believes "we" failed because we underestimated the enormity of the challenge, we backed an unpopular, undemocratic government, and we failed to gain the approval of the American people for the commitment. However, the author cannot bring himself to the realization that he and his staff of technocrats failed primarily because they sought a mathematical formula to end the war under favorable circumstances. The lessons McNamara believes we should have learned are these: US leadership should plan better in the future, should insure that future military commitments are in our interests, should make future commitments as part of a multinational force, preferably under the United Nations, and should spend more for foreign aid and less for defense. McNamara's conclusions are unsurprising; however, after a careful re-reading of his book, this reviewer could find little evidence supporting these conclusions.
Why did McNamara choose to write this book at this time? Perhaps the memoir is in the nature of a catharsis. If it is an attempt at expiation, however, the author will receive no absolution from this reviewer. He would do better to make his apology in person at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, although it is unlikely that many of the disabled, the missing, the former POWs, or the still-grieving families of the dead would be sympathetic. McNamara's departure from the Pentagon in 1968 was concomitant with the rupture of the Democratic Party, when "protest liberals" seized control of that party from the "internationalists." Protestors took to the streets, and McNamara removed himself from the scene; he has seemingly been trying to regain credibility within the liberal elite ever since. When President Clinton was asked by a reporter whether, having protested against the war, he felt "vindicated" by McNamara's book, he said that he did. In that light, perhaps this book at this time may be an attempt to aid a national political party in some distress.
Although comments by warriors and protestors alike have focused attention upon McNamara's book for the present, it is important to note the recent works of scholars who are producing more dispassionate, balanced analyses on Vietnam.
In the light of post-Cold War realities, some writers have suggested that the war in Vietnam should be considered as one long and bitter campaign in the war for containment of communism, which the Free World ultimately won. This is the theme of the measured analysis by Dr. William J. Duiker in his book U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina. Duiker, Professor of East Asian History at Penn State University, clearly establishes President Kennedy as the agent of irrevokable commitment of the United States to the security of the Republic of Vietnam. Fearful of being charged with losing Asia to communism, Kennedy committed this nation to fighting a war that ultimately required a greater degree of sacrifice than our people were willing to make. Kennedy and his associates directed the war in an ad-hoc fashion, tying US prestige to victory under circumstances where victory was doubtful from the start, according to Duiker. They entered upon the war in ignorance, shortsightedness, a degree of hubris, and a tendency to see the United States as representing truth and goodness. Duiker finds no evidence that Kennedy was considering withdrawal from Vietnam at the time of his death. (McNamara, conversely, believes it is "highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam.") Duiker concludes with an admonition against trying to apply the lessons of Vietnam to future wars.
Dr. Richard A. Hunt, a historian in the US Army's Center of Military History, has written Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds, a comprehensive history of the US-led struggle for the loyalty of the people of South Vietnam. Defining pacification as programs of social and economic reform accompanied by security, Hunt states that applying this politico-military program to Vietnam was the greatest challenge for the United States, and the greatest failure.
President Kennedy was fascinated by the US Army's Special Forces, whom he saw as uniquely qualified to conduct pacification, or "counterinsurgency." The activism of the Kennedy team enforced an optimism throughout the chain of command of the various programs, which in turn denied Kennedy and later Presidents reports of failure. Advisors to the Vietnamese leaders were increasingly pressed to report details of success in security and social change. Denied the command authority required to create the conditions that would effect change, the advisors were in an impossible situation. The succession of pacification programs--Agrovilles, Strategic Hamlets, Revolutionary Development, and related efforts--were consequently poorly coordinated bureaucratic struggles to accomplish an esoteric social change.
President Johnson described pacification as the "gut issue in this war." President Nixon emphasized pacification as the means to allow the United States to withdraw from Vietnam. Hunt concludes that, despite partial and temporary successes, pacification failed to reach any of its goals. Could pacification in Vietnam have succeeded if given more time? Hunt responds in the negative, adding that the question is moot because the American people were in no mood to allow more time to prosecute an already extended war.
Arguably the most successful of the US pacification efforts in Vietnam was the Combined Action Program (CAP) of the US Marines, described by Al Hemingway in his book Our War Was Different: Marine Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam. Hemingway, a Marine veteran of the war and a senior editor of Vietnam magazine, describes the tasks given to squads of relatively junior Marines selected for this duty: Live in the hamlets with the people, and train and conduct operations with the Self Defense Forces to secure the hamlets. American advisors to the Vietnamese paramilitary forces also trained village defense forces, but the CAP teams remained in the hamlets, while most advisors--and most of the Vietnamese leaders they advised--operated out of relatively secure headquarters. The main reason for the unique success of the CAP program was the reason the other programs failed: security of the people in the far hamlets at night. Hemingway believes the CAP disrupted the operations of the Viet Cong but did not destroy their infrastructure. The CAP operated with Popular Forces who were inadequately trained, poorly armed, poorly and irregularly paid, and poorly supported by corrupt government officials. Weaknesses of the CAP Marines were the language barrier and inadequate training for the job. As the war in Vietnam became more conventional after Tet 1968, the Marine command reluctantly turned to the more demanding task of defeating the regular forces of North Vietnam. The legacy of CAP, as with that of civic action conducted by other forces, is a record of limited, fragile success in "winning the hearts and minds" by the close association of Americans with the Vietnamese peasantry.
Frustrated by their failure to win the loyalty of the Vietnamese to their programs for saving South Vietnam from communism, American leaders tried to win with US conventional forces and tactics. Among the operational histories of American organizations fighting in Vietnam, Dr. Eric Bergerud's Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning is a recent example. Portraying the "world of a combat division in Vietnam" through the story of the 25th Infantry Division (the Tropic Lightning), Bergerud creates a revealing picture of their grueling experience. The soldiers tell of "thrashing the bush," suffering the heat, the insects, and the ambushes of an enemy who could seldom be seen. Offsetting these travails are descriptions of organizational effectiveness in swift airmobile maneuver--and a certain pride in unit membership and shared experience which distinguishes veterans of ground combat from other mortals. The division's soldiers were contemptuous of the performance of their allies in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam; they were equally critical of those in Washington controlling and limiting the war, of the media, and of protestors back home. Like soldiers in other American wars, the GIs admired the toughness of their main enemy, the North Vietnamese soldier. As the war extended into 1969, problems related to declining morale and indiscipline increased. The soldiers acknowledged drug use, but--and this is worthy of note--they stated that such use was confined to the rear, to the areas where boredom was the biggest enemy. Although the soldiers expressed a cynicism about their experience and its value, most were defensively proud that they had served their country, and their anger was directed at those who denigrated that service.
Dr. George C. Herring's LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War continues the theme of frustration with an incisive examination of President Johnson's direction of the war. Herring, Alumni Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, has published previous best-selling histories on the Vietnam War. In this volume, he encapsulates the drives, the moods, and the motivations of Johnson, a President who was increasingly frustrated by entrapment in a war with a "little fourth-rate country" half-a-world away from Washington. Herring reveals Johnson's passion for secrecy, for loyalty, and for enforcing consensus among his senior advisors. A consummate politician and a highly successful leader of legislatures, Johnson was uncomfortable in his role as the commander of the US armed forces, and he mistrusted his military subordinates more than he did his civil aides. According to Herring, Johnson never formulated a strategy for winning in Vietnam, nor even for controlling the major commitment of American combat power which he initiated. He politicized the military chain of command, yet refused to take the advice of his military leaders when their recommendations ran contrary to his gut feelings. He hoped to crown his years in public life by winning the War on Poverty. In the end, the war in Vietnam, which Johnson tried to keep on the back burner, destroyed his presidency.
The military leader most responsible for Vietnam during the Johnson years is the subject of Westmoreland: A Biography of General William C. Westmoreland, by Samuel Zaffiri. This lightweight biography reveals considerable new information about and by Westmoreland. It shows him at the apogee of his service, appearing before a cheering joint session of the Congress; it carries the story through to the nadir of Westmoreland's life, the libel suit against CBS. Zaffiri, who obviously admires the general (as do many who served under him, including this reviewer), displays Westmoreland as more perspicacious about the problems of Vietnam than heretofore revealed. The Westmoreland in this book is too often right on matters about which the record shows everybody who was anybody to have been wrong. The book includes too many castigations of Westmoreland's colleagues, and it shows him to be more narrow than most of us know him to be. Loosely written and poorly edited, this book does no credit to its subject. Westmoreland is a tragic figure in American military history. He deserves great credit for slowing the sweep of communism in Vietnam, gaining time for the other free nations of Southeast Asia to build their defenses. That is his major contribution.
Autobiographies abound on service in Vietnam. Many reveal acts of heroism, some defying the logic of that battlefield. Stories of the "I was there" category appear to be declining in number. One waits with unbated breath for the capstone book: I Was the Last Postal Clerk in Saigon.
One of the more interesting autobiographies is Howard R. Simpson's Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952-1991. A foreign service officer and journalist, Simpson's book covers Vietnam from the fall of the French to the recent opening of communist Vietnam to the outside world. Like "Pug" Henry in Winds of War, Simpson dropped in upon many decisive actions spread over considerable time and space. He saw and appreciated the end of French colonialism in Southeast Asia; he watched the United States, struggling to support a corrupt South Vietnamese government, try to turn the conflict into a conventional war. He watched from afar as the United States turned the war over to a Vietnamese army disinclined to fight. Returning to a communist Vietnam in 1991, he saw it reemerging into world trade and association. The story is instructive, but in the "I told you so" vein.
It is appropriate to mention also the genre of biographies of women who served in Vietnam. Among the newest is American Daughter Gone to War: On the Front Lines with an Army Nurse in Vietnam, by Winnie Smith. The author, who served as a nurse in hospitals that treated recently wounded servicemen, was too young and idealistic to accept easily the disfigurement and death of young soldiers whom she treated and befriended. The emotional trauma that resulted for Smith, and the scars that she continues to bear, led her into activism for veterans rights and into tearful associations with veterans who had been denied government medical treatment and financial support. It is no discredit to her service and personal sacrifice to opine that some of her fellow activists appear, 20-plus years after the war, to have achieved the status of "professional veterans."
As the Vietnam generation passes into late middle age, a consensus appears to be developing on the history and legacy of the war in Vietnam. The great opus on this conflict, however, remains to be written.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergerud, Eric M. Red Thunder, Tropic Lightning: The World of a Combat Division in Vietnam. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Duiker, William J. U.S. Containment policy and the Conflict in Indochina. Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994.
Hemingway, Al. Our War Was Different: Marine Combined Action Platoons in Vietnam. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1994.
Herring, George C. LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War. Austin,: Univ. of Texas Press, 1994.
Hunt, Richard A. Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995.
McNamara, Robert S., with Brian VanDeMark. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. New York: Times Books, 1995.
Simpson, Howard R. Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952-1991. New York: Kodansha, 1994.
Smith, Winnie. American Daughter Gone to War: On the Front Lines with an Army Nurse in Vietnam. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.
Zaffiri, Samuel. Westmoreland: A Biography of General William C. Westmoreland. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
The Reviewer: Colonel Paul F. Braim, USA Ret., is Professor of History at Embry Riddle University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware and has written and lectured on military history and military affairs.