I must confess that I am not feeling terribly patriotic today having just finished Nick Turse's Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The book makes a persuasive case that the My Lai Massacre was not an aberration, but simply one egregious example of the kind of atrocity that occurred with regularity in a war where American commanders made "body count" the only performance standard. Consider for example Operation Speedy Express which ran from December 1968 through May 1969, where the 9th Infantry Division reported killing 10,899 enemy troops, but only recovered 748 weapons. During one week in April 1969, the division reported killing 699 guerrillas while losing only one man and capturing only nine weapons. The book is well sourced and well written, but hard to get through.
For someone who would like to understand the Vietnam War better, but is not eager to slog through 260 pages of America's war crimes, I would recommend Fredrik Logeval's Pulitzer Prize winning Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam. The book deals with France's ill-fated attempt to reestablish its empire in Indochina after World War II, which America backed in order to assure French support in the developing Cold War in Europe. The book makes clear just how fucked up the situation in Vietnam was long before the United States decided to put troops on the ground and why it was so unlikely that things would ever turn out any better than they did.
Whenever I go to the library, I browse through the new non-fiction section and grab whatever I think might be interesting. By coincidence, the other book I grabbed last week also concerned the U.S. Army behaving badly; this time in Colorado in 1864. In A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, Ari Kelman examines the various ways that America and Americans have coped with the memory of one particularly troubling incident from the time it occurred through the dedication of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site in 2007. I'm just getting started on that one though.
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thanks for the book recommendations. I will keep a lookout for these in the public library.
ReplyDeleteThe question here is whether or not one would truly understand the war better by reading such a book. There are far too many (you, perhaps?) who would read this book and feel the have learned all they need to know to validate their preconceived notions about that war. "Oh, but it has footnotes!" Too many want to believe that the United States is the evil empire who has thrown its weight around the world in a quest for world domination. This book will further encourage and cement that sentiment for those who have already chosen to believe it.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I felt the need to seek out reviews of the book to get a sense of what others are saying about it. It wasn't hard to find those that regard it as proof of what they "knew" about the war and our role in it. But the excerpts each provided made it easy to take that position, as it gave the impression of United States as the Snidely Whiplash to Viet Nam's Nelle.
I do not wish to diminish the fact that war crimes were committed by American troops. To pretend that we have always been exemplary in our execution of war is a position no better or truthful. But the book, based on most of the reviews I've read, seems to take a decidedly one-sided view that paints the entirety of the US military with the same evil color. I found two reviews, however, that indicate something more. This one reminds people that despite the fact that atrocities took place, there still existed plenty of honorable soldiers who fought as we all hope our military will should it need to. You'll note that this particular reviewer does no sugar coating at all, and even has a definition of "atrocity" that most people don't who aren't leftist America haters.
This one at first seems to take the US military as savage murderer position until the end, when he suggests a possible explanation for how some of the atrocities were set ups by enemy intelligence efforts.
Once again, my aim here is to mitigate the compulsion to take books like this one as the be-all/end-all of the Viet Nam story. It is but one more telling that might not be putting things in a perspective that is the most objective. The first review I listed suggests this as well and it would be smart to keep from getting emotionally tied to one author's (or even several) offerings as if there are no credible counterpoints.
Turse describes a time when some very bad choices were made in the Vietnam War, but I tend to think that by the point these events occurred, there were very few good choices left, mostly because, by that time the battle for the hearts and minds of the of the South Vietnamese people was lost beyond recovery. That is why I would recommend Logeval’s book so highly because I think it shows that the seeds of the mistakes the United States made in the 1960’s were planted in the 1940’s and 1950’s. That is how Turse's book fits into my thinking.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is a lot more to the story.
Thanks for the recommendation, I've been keeping an eye out for a book like this ever since I heard a statement from Noam Chomsky that said something along these lines. He had said that when My Lai had occurred initially the anti-war movement was aware of it but had no compunction to make a big deal out of it because it was exactly like what had happened over and over again already. This was pretty standard. And that's really not surprising when you simply watch B-52's carpet bombing the place. You don't bring out B-52's if you have any intention of sparing children and civilians. But anyway of course later it grabbed the American consciousness and the anti-war movement seized on it because it seemed to be working. According to Chomsky this was late enough in the war that the business community was starting to turn against it. The real goal is to just wreck the place so that nobody else similarly attempts to follow an independent course. Ideally we'd have installed a puppet dictator like in Latin America, but that would be achieving maximum goals. We have already achieved the basic goals and otherwise we're just pouring money in, so let's move on. So it became possible for media to start paying some attention to things like this, since the business community would allow it (media is big business of course). The Life photographer had snapped pictures in this case, so for some reason it just took hold.
ReplyDeleteIt won't surprise you to know that I feel the same way about the 4th, particularly when the Vietnam Vets go by in the parade and everyone stands. I mean, it's not like I despise veterans. I pity them. They were all manipulated into participating in a grossly immoral atrocity. Pretty much unprecedented. People forget that the war was not just against Vietnam, but also Laos and Cambodia. They dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped during the entirety of WWII by both sides, and that includes the nuclear blasts. Just an atrocious crime. And people don't really know much about it. They actually don't know when the war started or who the US actually attacked. To see people stand and cheer for it is such an incredible testament to the power of propaganda.
Another excellent book is A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Vann was an American colonel who acted as an adviser to the South Vietnamese forces before the United States committed troops. He believed in the war itself, but recognized that it was being badly fought by a corrupt regime.
DeleteI think that the ultimate responsibility rests with the politicians who followed the path of least resistance and put the American military into a situation that was not amenable to a military solution. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all knew that we needed to get out, but none of them was willing to take the political flack that would follow if they pulled out.
Let me know what you think of my book, please. In the meantime, thanks for mentioning it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by. I just posted some thoughts.
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